Why does that matter? They knew it was broken but didn’t explicitly notify the cleaning company to avoid the fridge. Like what is the argument exactly? “I knew this was broken and didn’t tell you about it. Now you owe me money because the broken thing interfered with your work.”
The sign was specifically for the cleaner, explaining the problem, plus instructing them not to clean the area. It also told them how to mute the alarm sound if it was annoying.
In hind sight it would have been better to pre-contact the cleaning company and make sure the cleaner in question understood the situation.
But that's only from knowing after the fact that the cleaner was hmmm... a friggin idiot. ;)
Do you really think the cleaner looks at every thing posted in the lab as he cleans? Very unlikely. Agreements require a meeting of the minds. The only idiots I see are the ones that lost decades of research.
As far as I'm concerned killing the breaker to mute an annoying alarm is malicious. While there certainly seems to be laxness in their precautions I think the primary blame goes to the cleaning company.
The system was already in a failing state if an alarm was going off. It was being neglected. Letting your car alarm blare 24/7-- that's malicious. Anyone attempting to disable it is an aggrieved victim. You're reversing the roles of victim and offender.
If the system was that vulnerable, area denial is step 1. Evacuation/remediation is step 2-3. Putting up a sign saying both "stay away" and "push this button" (that some Honduran or Dominican or whoever may not even be able to read in the first place) is well-intentioned but misguided. It's not the cleaner's fault they walked into a minefield. This wouldn't even be up for discussion if this were an open elevator shaft or arcing electrical panel. A problem existed-- fault is not attributable to whoever next encounters it.
Right now, I have a degraded zpool that's lost 3/6 disks-- one more failure and it's toast. Putting my NAS on the circuit connected to the light switch (no UPS!), then blaming my wife for destroying all of my life's work when she so much as walks into a dark room is just sadistic irresponsibility. Teenage girls do this shit. It's bully logic.
How about if you stick a sign over the top of the light switch saying "Please don't turn this off, there's an emergency with the NAS and I'll lose all the data if this switch gets turned off"?
If she still turns it off anyway, you'd be forgiven for being a tad unhappy about it... ;)
