'Idiot' pulls cables, downs ISPs at Telecity

@Andy ORourke

Indeed, this has Telecity written all over it!

Mine's the one with the prod in the pocket... (I'm going monkey hunting!)

Why am I not surprised?

I have had personal experience of This Place and their lackadaisical attitude to client kit - in my case, it was tape stackers that they....

..actually, I can't go into detail, my blood pressure can't take it.

My opinions on that particular visit from the F***-Up Fairy can be found here:

http://dungeekin.blogspot.com/2008/03/event-visit-from-fuckup-fairy.html

It's time for my therapy session, I'm still trying to handle the memories and the repressed rage!

(Paris coz even she could do a better job!)

Boneheaded Move Here Too

A good number of years back, working in a company which ahd a number of switches, but hadn't sprung for any of the bonus features, like backplane links or anything.

So all the switches were connected with patch leads (I Know, I know bandwidth bottlenecks and what have you)

Anyway, someone, it may be me, it may not, was 'tidying' up some cabling, and ran a new patch lead between two switches......

Two switches, that were already patched together....

Oh the joy, the joy...

Traffic on the network, fairly rapidly ground to a halt.

When the culprit cable was identified, the person responsible was of course on the wrong end of many jokes, and the cable itself was mounted on a piece of wood, and hung above the server room door as a reminder.

Anonymous, as I do have some professional pride!

At least you know

It wasn't a BT engineer as this "Idiot" managed to at least re connect cables to ports ;-)

is this /.?

Some of the comments about this retard appear to have come from retards themselves.

Feck off back to /. will ya!

Because fact into doubt won't go...

So, looking at the story and originating blog: some guy writes that some guy says that some other guy is an idiot.

It's mostly fact free and yet were happy to point and laugh at some poor f'ker, who presumably will know about the incident's reporting on the Reg.

Cables should be labelled. People who are working on live kit should be qualified and have some sort of plan or process for the work they are doing. If this was not the case here it's a failure in managing the datacentre.

Sympathy

I can have a little sympathy for the guy. Many times I've ripped out code that clearly could not work, has no references in the main codebase, and was commented everywhere with "Doesn't work." Of course the next day is catastrophic. Some obscure system that used to spit out errors all day now crashes. The obscure system is still listed as a health check for the hardware that replaced it two years ago. The health check failures cascade and everything is dead. Now comes 100 "WTF happened" e-mails, followed by a dozen meetings on the same topic, followed by a new set of rules so specific that they have no general value for future events whatsoever.

し〜〜〜〜〜ん。

Okay, Thursday's 1650Z anonymous -- are you seriously telling us nobody's ever made a CLM on a border router's BGP configuration?

@Fraser

Knowing Datahop and their attention to detail - they would have been but if it was just a random member of Teleshity's 'intelligent hands' staff that was doing something - im surprised they could even read the work request properly.

We had a feed from DH a while ago for over 2 years - never had any issues with it. On the other hand, Telecity constantly screwed simple requests up from rebooting a wrong machine (we send request for server 123, and they reboot 124!?) to removing the wrong hot swap drive even when given the exact label.

At least everything is back up now.

What I did once

At my last place of employment (an electronics factory), I turned off a flow soldering machine because none of the isolators in the room where I had been working late sorting out someone else's foul-ups were labelled. Those things take a full day to heat up to working temperature. I only kept my job because of how much s#!t the company would have been in if I did the usual "disgruntled former employee" act. (And nobody else would have done my job for what they were paying me.)

And a former colleague of mine once managed to write a WHERE clause that matched every record in the database, not just the one that he wanted to alter. This was in an old version of MySQL that didn't support transactions, but fortunately most of the information in the database was duplicated elsewhere -- in disparate files. It took some amazing Perl coding to fix it. Since then, he always added LIMIT 1 to the end of his queries; and I test out my WHERE clauses by first using them in a SELECT and seeing if the result set is sane. If anybody asks, it's to cache the matches in RAM and so speed up the real query.

'Fire Incident' @ Telecity HEX

Now I've been told that they've had a 'fire incident' at Telecity HEX last night - someone burning the CCTV evidence of their previous crimes...?

Try harder next time...

I once did a planned work that took me 10min instead of the usual <2min, when I explained to the boss that I had been a bit thick in not noticing a "transmit inhibit" had enabled after I changed some settings (neglecting to mention the pub dinner before shift start) he said: "That's why planned work notices are scheduled for 10min even if it's a two minute job."

As my lecturer in broadcast engineering said to us "Your not a real engineer until you've taken a broadcast network off-air." .... I'm a real engineer several times over.

Paris, because she knows where everything goes.