Taronga Zoo Story
Taronga Zoo StoryThis is such a great story, I pulled it out of the HeroicDebugging page so it could stand on its own.
I was working as a contractor at Taronga Zoo (Sydney), on a livestock tracking system.
The deal with this is that most of the larger animals have eartags that can be detected by radio transceivers located at strategic points around the enclosures. This allows the zookeepers to do stuff like detect that the orangs are already in their night cage and lock the door without actually going out to check, or to notice from the office that a zebra has approached within 2 metres of the outer fence (i.e. they have got past the inner fence). One day there was an enormous fuss when it was discovered from the console that the male lion had gone off-line, so either we had a system failure or the lion had escaped. Luckily, since the lion was still where he was supposed to be, it had to be a system failure.
Since none of the other animals were missing, we guessed that it was a problem with the ear tag. As it turned out, the only staff members who had any expertise with the tags were (a) sick and (b) on maternity leave; so the only person in the zoo who knew how to install an ear tag was me. This meant I had to go with the lionkeeper into the lion's enclosure, and install a new ear tag. Well it wasn't so hard to get the tag on the lion, him being well-fed and not really being interested in moving, but of course once we got the new tag on, it didn't work. That was pretty strange, since I had tested it already and I knew it did work. I figured it must be the radio transceivers. So I took the ear tag myself, and started walking around the perimeter of the enclosure trying to see where/whether the tag would be detected.
I think this is where we breached the OccupationalHealthAndSafety? guidelines - because the lionkeeper stayed with the male, I went behind this bamboo thicket and was suddenly by myself with only the female lions for company. And the female lions were much more curious, particularly about the laptop I was carrying. Now don't forget here that it is the females which are the killers. So I am slowly, carefully, mostly terrified, walking around the perimeter of this enclosure, followed by two female potentially man-eating lionesses; when suddenly I pass the break in the transceiver network, and the laptop lets out this tremendous beep and scares the heck out of me.
And the lions.
I jumped, they growled, and I dropped the laptop. Luckily for me, one of them bit the screen of the laptop, and the other one tried to bite the keyboard. I had enough presence of mind to leave them to it, and strolled back to the lionkeeper, where I politely asked if we could leave in a hurry.
Lesson learned:
I suppose it's fair to say the lionesses were PairProgramming ...
Yes, and PrideGoethBeforeaFall. So does BeepSpeek go before a fall...
Amusingly, this popped to the top of RecentChanges about a month ago, and I just started reading a book that mentioned the Taronga Zoo. --PeteHardie
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(last edited July 17, 2009)
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