The comms room & the coconut.

Back in the day, when I was working in the defence industry, I was given a tour of a rather large and impressive comms room. Being in the defence industry back then, they would put loads of aviation test gear in there along with the usual servers.

As you walked in, there was a half-height wall with a half-coconut shell on top of it.

I casually asked why it was there - some internal joke thing?

I was told to pick up the coconut shell (half expecting a prank bang), but underneath the shell was a big red button.

Yes, you guessed it - a big red button to immediately shut all the power off to the comms room.

Apparently, when the button was "sans" coconut, it was too tempting and more than a few people had pressed it to see what it did. 🥥🌴