[dmonagha]

Once upon a time I worked a contract gig at a credit union in the US. My first day in the datacenter (ground floor), I noticed the grill from a late 90s/early 2000 Ford F-150 pickup truck hanging on the wall above the door frame. I pointed it out and asked "why is that on the wall?"

The building was like many bank buildings, 4-5 stories, all glass exterior, off a busy main road. In particular, this building was parallel to the busy main road.

Turns out, the busy main road was perpendicular to another road, which lined up almost perfectly with the datacenter on the first floor. One Saturday night, a drunk driver ran the stop sign on the side street, blasted through the field leading up the datacenter, and drove their truck straight into the building, right through the offices surrounding the main server room. The force of the crash blew bricks across the room in all directions and missed the raised floor by maybe 3 meters.

Surprisingly, nothing went down. The datacenter now has "bulletproof" glass on that portion of the exterior, poles installed into the ground in front of the glass, and an earth berm raised above the road.

The sysadmins found the truck grill inside one of the offices under a desk. They kept it and hung it on the wall as a reminder to plan for any sort of disaster.