How to fix a Navy submarine server

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 2 Nov 2007 at 09:50

A new advert for the Royal Navy reveals the amazing technical wizardry behind the computer systems controlling Her Majesty's fleet.

The fly-on-the-wall recruitment advert shows an IT technician aboard a submarine, making repairs to a submarine's servers.

"I've been into computers since I were a lad," says the naval IT guy, whose grasp of grammar is second only to his technical prowess.

"I suppose I could end up doing an IT job in an office," he claims. "But being an engineering technician in the Royal Navy I've got to be a bit more creative."

Quite right. No room for error when you're dealing with nuclear weapons 200ft beneath the surface. So what's our naval hero's secret of success?

"If the server goes down, I can't just call in some bloke to fix it," he adds. Indeed, we wouldn't want any old monkey tinkering with mission-critical computers, even if we could get him aboard. "But to be honest, sometimes I just switch it off and on again," our man concludes.

Well, we can all sleep easy in our beds now, then.

Click here to watch the video.

Click here to visit the Royal Navy careers site. Your country needs you. Desperately.