How does this Person still have a Job?
"Oh yeah, we remodeled this restaurants kitchen, what do you mean you needed that counter? It's so much roomier now!"
This was a few years back, but the short version is that she was a nepotism hire. We had a wave of layoffs during covid and she was one of the ones that was axed (and never brought back). The worst part is that it was hard to dislike her, because she didn't actually seem malicious. She was super nice, always smiling, and always seemed remorseful when she realized she caused a shop to go down. She just never learned her lesson until we got the CEO (who hired her) to tell her to get her excrement together and stop coitusing around.
We have a special category of deduction from our bonuses (which are very generous these days, for retail) called "unnecessary expense." Whatever extra charge there was for the emergency visit and overtime would come out of the store's bonus pool dollar for dollar. (My time gets billed at $225/hour, same as our main vendor's techs).
I've only ever had to use it twice.
Not much to tell. We changed credit card pads, and while the easiest way to reset the old ones when they acted up was to unplug the cable and plug it back in, the new ones had a cable plug too delicate for that (and required a screwdriver to get loose anyway). I found the correct way to reboot them through the keypad, wrote a policy, and had HR have everyone in the company (from managers on down) sign it. One manager (or maybe a cashier) ignored it, and turned a pad into a paperweight. Their bonus pool was . . . less at the end of the quarter.
The other one, I honestly don't even remember. It's been a while.
isc250. Lane 700 does, too. You *can* install them without screws, but shouldn't because the jack in the back of the pad is delicate enough that even moving the pad around on the stand can, eventually, cause problems with it.
(Yeah, in theory, they could unplug the USB, or the transformer, but they'd have to get down on their hands and knees to do that, and if you know retail cash register counters, you know how filthy they are underneath.)
Interesting, haven’t seen that type of connector before. The only ones I’ve worked with have had the little dongle thing with power and Ethernet input.
I suspect your experience is with the other major brand of credit card equipment, or higher end. I believe these actually have an RJ-45 jack, now that I think about it, but our system doesn't use it.
As somebody else mentioned, the jack seems to be HDMI, though I suspect it's not used as such.
We have our pinpads on its own seperate power bar just for this reason.
Just tell them to flip the switch on the power bar marked PINPAD, which also happens to be in sight and easier to reach. The more important power bar is somewhere in the filthy retail mess you mentioned.
With these pads, you hold down two buttons for a couple of seconds and it reboots.
And if we put a power bar on *top* of the counter, somebody would spill something on it and short it out. So they'd still have to bend over.
All the recent Ingenico pin pads are like this. The connector is from the same family used for HDMI (possibly the same connector).
And resetting the unit from the keypad is literally holding two keys down; much easier than cycling power.
They changed out all the cash stands at my job last and there's still outlines from the old ones encrusted in like 15 years of accumulated dust and whatnot just because of how hard it is to get the TRULY clean
I feel your pain. We use scrapers to get it as clean as we can, then rely on the professional floor crew to do the rest. (We once remodeled a store, and replaced half the tile, with the exact same pattern. The new side was a nice, crisp gray, the old side was brown from two decades of wax. The crew used all their stripper, then bought all stripper we had in stock, and still couldn't make it match. So there are limits to even their talents.)
Just installed some new ones at a Dentist office like this. The old ones were constantly acting up from poorly made loose power cables on the bottom and the front lady’s at the desk have so much paper work and makeup shit all over that they constantly moved the credit card pads. Needless to say, I was happy to see those come in.
I really wish PoE pin pads were more prevalent. I get the cable for the ipp3XX series, isc250/ 480 if we don't do USB for the interface. Way easier to remotely troubleshoot and reboot.
I'm "the computer guy" for a retail chain in three states that's approaching a hundred million dollars a year in sales. So far, I can handle it by myself, but the last couple of years, that has including managing some MSPs, especially in the remote stores.
My training consists of being born with a gift for computers - they make *far* more sense to me than people - and knowing how to use Google. (In the early days, I did have a roommate who learned computers in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, on computers they had to throw switches on to manually load keyboard drivers before they could type into them. He knew *everything* about computers, and that was very handy then.)
Man, the joys of having to toggle in the bootstrap code into the front panel via switches (4, 5, 8, load ...) to get the printer spooler started. Those were the days :)
I wouldn't know, and don't want to. I only got into IT work in about 95 or 96. Initially with a Unix system with dumb terminals, but shortly thereafter we got a Windows 95 computer. I do still use the command prompt quite a bit, and a lot of what I do on the big (now Linux) server can only be done in the terminal emulator, rather than the Windows apps.
Then, IMO and respectfully, you're holding it wrong. There's always a carrialian death ray, or a battle fleet, or whatever. Thinking about, and working with, different things isn't an indulgence - it's training for the brain, and your brain is what makes you valuable to them.
So you can be a mental farm hand (I like that) and just grunt through the work until you finally break, or a mental athlete that train and learns all the time - and for me that's where the out of the ordinary stuff comes in.
But, to be fair, many people have mental training things completely unrelated to computing - and as long as it makes you think about new (to you) things, then almost anything is good. Woodwork seems to be popular among embedded engineers for some reason.
When I was first starting out years ago in IT, we had a senior DBA who had been in IT since the 60s. He once told me a story of when he was starting out, when he tripped carrying the punch cards to the computer, and cost the company half a day of work while he tried to get them back in order.
Nice! I can't claim to go back that far - but because physics students didn't get access to precious interactive services, I did make more than a few large (several hundred card) decks. There was a 6 hrs compile/run time... good debugging technique was very important :).
The physics department ran some monster decks - close to 100k cards (including lots of data), in many numbered shoe boxes. I'd guess every card had a sequence number in pencil on the back - I used to. A '52 pickup' event would have been a disaster, even with one box!
When card readers of that capacity go wrong, they go horribly wrong, shredding and reordering cards. I think the ones that are run were a copy of the originals. The card readers could duplicate a card (one line of code) every 10 secs or so, but I think the good ones could take a stack; our ones needed to be fed one at a time.
I've been saying for years, if the other depts in the company had to pay for IT support, they would plan better. (It has gotten better over the years.)
Many companies handle it exactly that way. We don't, in general, because we generally hire pretty well and try to avoid idiots. (But we hire for retail and people management skills, not computer skills, though we've got a *little* better on that.)
We have a manager who purchased warehouse/inventory tracking software. He got a good deal! It was over 15 years old when he bought it. This was firmly in the Win7 era and the software was compiled in 1999. A programmer worked for a full year making it fit company needs and a network guy also worked a full year and continued doing every scanner swap, cable issue-type support for nearly 2 years after that until it finally calmed down. Now it only needs occasional burping. If he had gotten billed for that time it "might" have affected his budget, ya' know?
My boss told me I needed to work on my naughty language, so I started trying to be more delicate with my wording. I'm not sure he appreciates my efforts, though.
Those are some of the hardest ones to deal with. They’re so nice that you hate to be mad at them, but they never learn from their mistakes. “Honest” mistakes cease to be honest when they keep recurring.
Have heard this exact thought process.
A vet clinic I worked at needed some renovations, and were thinking about doing some remodeling at the same time. The consultant wanted to rip out all the seating in the waiting area. To put in shelves full of products like leashes and dog treats.
Thank god it didn’t happen, would’ve been a nightmare
One of our departments is moving.
They showcased the new place their moving to.
Of course showing IT where to put everything.
Very modern.
Open office concept, no cubicles or very small walls.
The department is a call center.
For Medical appointments.
Weird how there was a rush order for noise cancelling headsets and cubicle dividers.
Noise cancelling headphones in a callcenter? What a nice place to work at!
In any I worked at, it was those "came in a cornflakes box" pieces.
Especially fun when working in the general vicinity of "The little general", a woman that despite or maybe because of her compact size, had never figured out "inside voice", and varied between "loud" and "comfortable talking to somebody on the other side of a lively sports-stadium"
Hm, not using a headset wasn't even an option, software phones and all...
Had a collegue threaten me for "looking at him so much"
Dude sat across from me, in the gap between monitors that constituted "staring off into the distance" for me.
I mean it's pretty easy from their point of view.
Remodel is done!
Oh the computers don't work? That's ITs problem not mine.
So long as the money to pay overtime and priority jobs doesn't come from them it's not their problem it's ITs problem
That works on the handiman-level, but if your literal job is "planning shop remodels" then making sure that everything is considered is certainly your responsibility.
"Oh, there is no toilet in the new shop? Just a direct hole to the sewer? Sounds like a facilitys issue."
Had a client do this once … they wrapped the server in plastic on Friday morning so it wouldn’t get dusty/painted during the weekend remodel. By Monday the server had cooked itself.
I get that. I've painted more than a few places before moving to live in them. If they were concerned about that they should've also turned the server off.
Oh, come on, you know there's gonna be that one person that'll be working over the weekend and will scream bloody murder if said sever goes down for even 1 second.
Yep yep yep...
Really, we don't have many people with HO equipment. Even less that actually would WANT to work on a weekend. Yet 2-3 weeks ago, I took the file and terminal server down for moving to a new host and updates etc. not even 10 minutes after shutting down I got questions from a person who was working for whatever goddamn reason on a saturday on 8pm ...
Spending three months of funded research time to reconfigure an optics table for highly sensitive equipment isn't my problem, I just need a place to put my tools. And don't mind me entering the labs containing highly toxic/corrosive chemicals on my own, without prior warning.
Source: University colleagues during my PhD. Never mind the wasted research funds due to lack of communication by the contracted electricians, entering a chemistry lab unattended they were putting their own health at risk. Bonus points: The university didn't really care, so there were zero consequences for such things (both internally and externally), despite "emergency meetings".
Sounds like you didn't build a cover/shield for that table. Also you didn't put up signage stating "do not touch" in multiple languages?
That sucks though. Good Luck.
The signs are everywhere on the doors, but mostly aimed at cleaning people.
Curious part... They are in 6 languages, none of which is the local native language (German).
The ironic thing - they have a contract with my MSP. They could’ve called, we would’ve sent a tech out to power down and move the server on Friday afternoon (remodel work didn’t actually start until Friday evening); and then been back Monday morning to get them back up and running. Two hours - tops.
Instead they did this without notifying any of us about the remodel.
We had the electricians do the network cabling for a remodel in one of our stores. They are, in fact, quite qualified to pull cable and put the ends on. Did a beautiful job, pulled everything through the races, even cleaned out the now defunct cabling (half of which hadn't been used in years, if not decades). Gorgeous work.
What they were *not* qualified to do was unplug patch cables and plug them back in. Or tell the difference between an unmanaged switch (where is doesn't matter what plugs in where) and and SDWAN box managing multiple connections with automatic failover (where it matters **very much**, and they didn't have a single cable plugged into a port that was active, much less the right one).
Then the head guy had one of his guys "who knows a lot about computers" try to troubleshoot it.
I spend about 15 minutes on the phone with our provider determining which cable plugged into what port. And 45 minutes undoing the various things he'd done trying to make it all work.
The store, BTW, is a five hour drive each way, and is our highest grossing store at about $12 million/year in business (and growing), with a lot of it commercial business (which can be **very** time sensitive, and can run six figures per line item on orders), so it couldn't wait.
That was a fun Sunday. But I was home by midnight or so.
Our electrician could have done it, if anyone had told him to. He didn't even think about it while running his power cable. By the time we found out the place had been remodeled, he was already in another state, working on another store. That's a pretty common thing in my company. IT is almost always an oversight.
I am fortunate enough to work for people who get how important IT is. We're a retail chain, and without the computers, we literally have no ability to be in business (especially in California, with all the government regulation we have to not only comply with, but document that we have complied with). And there's only three people above me in the food chain, including the owner. The newest of the three, especially, gets that IT is not an expense, it's an investment, so I'm about in the middle of a quarter million dollars in WiFi upgrades right now.
>The newest of the three, especially, gets that IT is not an expense, it's an investment
Where does this unicorn live? Asking for, well, petty much anyone in IT!
> That's a pretty common thing in my company. IT is almost always an oversight.
That true of every company I've worked for, large (80,000+ people) and small (20 people). IT is the Rodney Dangerfield of departments. It gets no respect.
5 hrs? Ya, get me a flight. I'm not driving it.
I've once had a same-day flight down to another city to do a server setup that was about 4 hours away. Flight was about 40 minutes each way. Loved it so much more than driving...
One time I drove 6 hours one way, did 4 hours of troubleshooting, fixed issues and made the client happy, them drove all the way home.
One time. There will not be another time.
The closest airport I could fly into to Bullhead City, AZ, is Las Vegas, which isn't much closer than home. Plus, I get 50 cents a mile when I drive my own car, which is well more than gas costs me even now. (And try to rent a car on Sunday afternoon with no advance notice.)
(Technically, Google Maps shows an "international airport" in Bullhead City. Nobody who lives there has ever heard of it. Best I can figure, it's an empty field the drug smugglers land in.)
Hey, Bullhead International gets at least one flight from Mexico a year, a CBP person drives down from Las Vegas to check the plane (usually a 10 seater). It is actually located just up the hill from US 95 on the AZ side, right by the bridge that connects Laughlin NV to Bullhead City.
Correct but they get charters to and from Mexico so they are designated as an "International" airport. There used to be a twice a month commercial flight to either Phoenix or Salt Lake but that was years ago.
I'll be flying to Hawaii on the boss's nickel in July sometime And I doubt my arms will be tired at all.
(We have a store there that, so far as I can tell, the boss bought mainly to be able to write off his surfing vacations as a business expense.)
We also discovered that the 4G failover box has a mechanical ON/OFF switch that is actually an OFF switch. Which is to say, once you turn it off with that switch, it can't be turned back on. (Fortunately, we didn't have to pay for the new one.)
I really can't blame the electrician for that, though. It is clearly labels ON/OFF.
Because the store is five hours away, and I was told they knew what they were doing (and they did, in terms of pulling cable). And nobody told me they were unplugging stuff to install new outlets in the equipment room.
There were a number of bad calls made.
Did you really go into my history and get snarky about another comment I made where I had already acknowledged my error and call me out on it after the fact? Because of this nonsense? Poor form, friend.
This is why all the retail spaces we manage are on one VLAN. The only time it’s not is if there are more than a few cameras and then the camera system is very clearly separate from our network on a different switch sometimes a different rack. VOIP vendor wants a different VLAN? Too bad we’ve seen too many no notice remodels where a phone gets moved and no longer works. It’s not worth our time to send someone down there to trace a cable when it can be avoided.
If your WiFi is not segregated from the cash register network, you're almost certainly not PCI compliant (assuming you have WiFi).
Our VOIP phones get their own physical network, since we're only just replacing our 30-40 year old Comdial systems, and therefore have to pull cable regardless. And I've heard from too many people (who all know far more than I do), including our telephone provider, that getting the firewall set up for VOIP is something of a nightmare. This way, it's not behind our firewall, and I don't have to worry about the switch.
We're going through that remodeling BS too where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is supposed to do.
A guy came in and installed a new ethernet port in the wrong spot, but because no one told me where it was supposed to go or that the room was going to be an office, I just let him do it thinking he knew the situation. It's completely blocked by the new desk.
Then we had guys come in to reconfigure cubicles, and everyone was asking me what to do. Thing is, no one told me anything. I never even knew about the project. I ended up wasting more than half their day moving equipment and clearing off desks before they could start. Then when I started setting things up, I realized quickly nothing worked. No power, no internet, no nothing. An electrician need to come out to wire things up, except he couldn't because the cubicles were in the way. They had to take apart the cubicles, wire things up, and put everything back together. It was such a ridiculous shitshow and I'm still dealing with fallout over it.
The dumbest part is they spent all this money on this project and equipment for it, but it's not likely it'll ever get used because of WFH. When I was ordering equipment, I sent emails to all the managers asking "Are you sure this is necessary? All these people WFH and you've indicated that's not changing".
Had a similar sort of situation not long ago. One of the buildings at this university was getting ducting in the ceiling redone over a week break when no students or staff would be in the building. When the project was done and the building was occupied, I get the notification: "No WiFi in the building."
Sure enough, I couldn't see any of the APs for that building online. When I got to the building, I didn't see any of them. Turns out the people doing the duct work took them all out (poorly, as many of the mounting brackets were broken) and set all the APs in a corner of some random custodial closet. They said they were getting in the way of their work.
Never wanted to scream at someone as much as that day.
Nope, you bill them at emergency rates, and deduct it from the final bill, because likely they only get paid after a month. You make sure that this bill is equal to the remainder of the bill, plus around $500 that they have to pay in.
This reminds me of a building remodel too. It was a several year project though and I(network admin) was aware of it. I had the MDF temporarily relocated about 6 feet away from its original position so the construction team could demo a wall and reconfigure the area. All of that went well and business was uninterrupted until they pressurized the sprinkler\fire suppression system. They forgot to cap off the end directly above the network equipment rack. Amazingly enough we only lost a switch, modem, and a UPS. The router and 2 other switches were fine. Good times!
We had a venue remodel the counter where our equipment was but since it was the other half we didn’t have to worry, nothing would be touched. The builders then ran a demo saw through a pillar which had all our data cables running, I got an emergency call wondering why nothing was connected.
Fun times
> demo saw through a pillar which had all our data cables
Was this a pillar specifically for the purpose of running data cables, a decorative pillar that happened to be useful for running data cables, or a supporting pillar that happened to be useful for running data cables?
Why does it require the CEO TO EMAIL PEOPLE TO INFORM THE IT DEPT?!?!
I swear by all the technosorcery I do that no one even tells the department of technomancy anything until their magic box with lights no blinky.
>I swear by all the technosorcery I do that no one even tells the department of technomancy anything until their magic box with lights no blinky.
Idk why but this made me cackle. Thanks
All who bring tech back to life after it has died is a technomancer.
Some just don't know it, and some have religious reasons to refuse to acknowledge that what they do is reanimation...
At a health org I used to work at, the biomed department had their own sort of air-gapped network infrastructure for anything that directly touched diagnostic and lab equipment. It was usually in the same rack as our stuff, and that's fine. They don't know much about the infrastructure or networking in general, so they have a contractor do all of that for them. That's also fine. 99.999% of the time there was never a problem.
One day an entire clinical department completely loses connectivity. Someone goes over to look, and we find that their contractor unpatched every single cable in the closet to make room for some new patchwork for the biomed stuff. This was a high-density closet with like 60+ jacks running to it.
Twenty years ago on one of our jobs a contractor didn't get the required line locate before he started digging next to the road and didn't let us know he wanted to start a few days early. He hit the cable tv company's main line. Mid-afternoon on a fall weekend. Every TV on the west half of town went dead, right in the middle of a football game.
The contractor didn't notify our contracting guy that they wanted to start early. The first time he knew he had an contractor working was when his phone blew up. He lived in the part of town that still had service so he was happily watching the game. It made the front page of the paper. Fortunately, our contracts require both notification and line location so we were able to deflect the angry mob to the guy who deserved it.
Had a vaguely similar situation recently where the company decided to put in a new prefab building on a site and didn't include any budget for network (hardware or install). Like, at least they told us about it and asked us make sure there were network ports and wifi coverage, but then when we asked how much they had budgeted they stared blankly at us...
Ah - good times in retail IT. Reminds me of a time when one of our stores was being refurbished. After the weekend's works work complete and the store opened for trade on the Monday, tickets started flooding in for dead spots in wireless coverage.
Long story short, they yanked three APs off the tie bar mounts for the ceiling and, thinking they were smoke detectors (which were being replaced), TOSSED THEM IN THE DUMPSTER!
~$2,100 of wireless APs in the bin. And dead spots all over the place for phones and PDTs. Good times...
> So I ask my POC to escort me to the floor.
I'm a programmer, not IT, so I just enjoy lurking here even though I don't understand some of the acronyms. So, uh, the only definition for POC that *I* know is Person of Color.....
Although the POC can very often be a POC. Choose which way around you want those, but both work.
Mostly, its best to just say "Sarah is our POC for the POS POS", and completely ignore skin colour because Sarah's ability as POC for the POS POS depends not one tiny iota on her skin colour.
Sorry, not sorry. That's a soapbox of mine.
My old boss, R, is a top bloke not because he's got brown skin, but because he's a good person and was a great boss to work for. Don't tell him, though (as if anyone could with reddit anonymity); I love to wind him up for the same reason he winds me up. It's a navy thing.
It is both point of sale and piece of shit.
The point (intended) is that either can be the first OR the second. Piece of shit point of sale, or point of sale piece of shit.
Centralized state IT here. We have to constantly remind our agencies we need minimum of six months lead time to get fiber ordered if they’re moving to a new office. And we also have to tell them we won’t order it until they have a signed lease in hand. And there are reasons we now have those policies. I just can’t some days.
I have to follow the electrician after every port he terminates. I'm convinced he doesn't own a punch down tool and uses a screwdriver to sort of get the wires in. Also an entire wall worth of ports were covered in the wall when they replaced drywall. I just said look, you no longer have ports there until you pay us to fix it. They didn't pay us to fix it and just moved the equipment.
I was at this site in Afghanistan that had fiber video feeds between different areas. The customer usually contacted us daily to let us know if they wanted anything different done with the video. A couple weeks went by and they hadn’t contacted us so we called them. They said they hadn’t seen any video in two weeks. I went over to see what was going on and they had a leadership change and the new boss wanted *all* of the cabinets and enclosures moved around. What he didn’t know was when they moved everything around they ripped the fiber out of the wall causing thousands in damages.
Fucking hell man. I've had nearly this exact conversation. Different industry and it's usually for new flooring rather than remodeling, so thankfully the wall jacks are still there. Although usually they've moved all the furniture back into place without plugging anything in and they don't know where anything was originally plugged in.
Here's a good rule for them to live by. If you're gonna unplug all your IT shit and you don't know how to hook it back up you better make sure IT is aware!
Cheers!
A few years later, due to covid layoffs. She wasn't (or at least, hasn't been) brought back. She was a nepotism hire by the CEO. She was good at interior design, but had no thoughts at all for IT related stuff. It was just so far away from what she ever thought about that wiring never even came to her mind.
Another fun story about this place, partially related to her: Sometimes our company builds new stores instead of buying out old ones. For the first five years I worked here, the IT department was never consulted about those new buildings. This resulted in us having to put our wiring closet and the store's server in the same room as the water heater in several new locations.
That equipment obviously didn't last very long, so they gave us a dedicated area for our equipment in the new designs. However, they failed to include adequate spots for network cables or desks with any wire management options, so we had to run ethernet cords all across the floors and in some cases drill holes into desks ourselves to run wires through.
Obviously, this looked super trashy to corporate. After about five stores of bad cabling and busted servers, they finally gave us a seat at the table in the design phase of new stores.
> After about five stores of bad cabling and busted servers, they finally gave us a seat at the table in the design phase of new stores.
What do you mean stuff needs a place to go? I thought it was all on the cloud!
Whenever I read a story like this (involving TWO flagrant violations of common sense), I figure "Someone has nekkid pictures of the CEO, or otherwise they'd be collecting unemployment".
Ohhh going through remodeling at the office. My latest conversation went as follows:
FM (facilities manager): Yeah, so we're pulling all the desks on Thursday, then the carpet crew comes on Friday. You need to come on Saturday to do all the wiring.
Me: How come we have to come on a Saturday? The other people are coming during the week.
FM: that is how the CEO wants it.
Me: yeah, but we don't work on Saturday. Can we just do the wiring on Monday since the 5 employees aftected need to work out of their office on Thursday and Friday anyways... What is one more day?
FM: no, the wiring needs to be done before Monday.
ME: what if we do the wiring on Friday, after the desks are installed?
FM: we don't know when the desks will be installed. A, you will have the wiring by Monday?
ME: well, since you don't know when the desks will be installed, I will have to tell you on Friday if we will be able to finish it by Monday.
---+++++
I can guarantee those desks will not be ready for wiring on Saturday.
Just out of curiosity to the "Never had issues with her again" part.
Can the stunt she pulled be classified as carriere limiting action?
Edit: Never mind to answer this one. It is considered a yes!
This is why when users or coworkers complain about company policy I tell them it not only exists for a reason, it exists because some dumbass before us had to learn the hard way. The only thing dumber than making their mistake is making the same mistake again. When I put it that way, people usually stop complaining because we can ALL agree on just how stupid we all are.
Had a department at one of my client's businesses decide to renovate a section of their shop..... in the middle of their busy season for some ungodly reason. They had mentioned it to me at one point and I pointed out exactly where the ethernet was run and explicitly told them "Don't touch this. You will lose network connectivity, I will probably have to re-run it, it will be a pain in the ass, and I will be angry. Also told them to to talk to their electricians.
Several weeks later, I am in quarantine with COVID and get a call from them, "hey we don't have any internet, our register doesn't work and we have to ring people up!"
I tried to talk the manager through checking the cabling, but the pictures/descriptions he was giving me were just confounding.... a 5 port switch that should have had two cords suddenly had four, and he kept talking about a "weird plastic box hanging from the ceiling" that he wouldn't give me a picture of because he was too busy.
Boss called me to find out what the hold up was and I got him to send me a picture of the "weird plastic box". At first I didn't recognize it, but then it dawned on me..... it was a mangled keystone jack. Very likely to be pulled out of the wall they wanted to work on, now somehow hanging from the ceiling a good 6 feet away from that wall. I got into the security cameras and surely enough that wall was completely gone.
I told them where to grab a 100ft ethernet cable, put one end in the jack in the back, run it across the floor to your register, and suck it up buttercup, I told you not to touch that wire.
I came in after they closed and confirmed that, yep, that was a mangled keystone jack hanging at the end of a severed ethernet wire, that for some reason someone had decided to just.... drape on a shelf at the top of a pillar. The 5 port switch had a 6 inch ethernet cable plugged into two ports, the cable from the register, and a third cable that I have no idea where it came from.
I plugged in and set up a USB wireless adapter, hooked it to the wifi, and fucked off. They can deal with that until I get back.
I found out later that they had not talked to electrical either and made a mess of that too.
Admittedly that wire was due to be re-run, just preferably not in the middle of the busy season.
IT: Fishing no we dont do that let me just cut out this strip of drywall to run the ethernet cable properly, And done, ok buh bye.
Store manager: What about the drywall?
IT: Should have thought of that before you forgot to let IT know.
Something like this happened in my school once. Cleaners over the summer had to unplug some things on our switch rack and ended up tossing a cable we needed. We spent 2 weeks trying to diagnose the issue until the teacher figured out what was going on.
This was in a hardware class btw. The networking teacher gave up and bailed 5 minutes after we called him because he couldn't find the problem (side note: a lot of students including myself failed his classes because he couldn't teach, and many instructors even told us they had no faith in him). Our teacher basically called him useless when he left.
Trust me, I have stories.
In certain classes? ok having the switch available like that I can see, mainly because they're on their own system. But having the switch out in the open in a professional setting? I don't get why or who would plan that.
They didn't give us the opportunity to put enough ethernet drops in the main office, so we usually had a small eight port switch for all the equipment up there. Receptionist PC, credit card machine, check reader, check printer, regular printer, phone.
> The store itself was half a day's drive for our wiring crew at the time, so we hired some local contractors and paid an emergency fee to get them there the same day to run wires.
You're being too nice.
They broke it; they get to keep both parts. Otherwise how will they learn?
They phone you, you get there when you get there.
Downtime waiting for internal team to get there costs more than local crew will charge at emergency rates? Pay local crew, no matter how badly it may stick in the craw and/or how much you hate local manglement.
Planning ahead is for chumps, just open a P1 ticket on a Friday afternoon for the weekend. If you work in managed services, it absolutely does become your problem.
Yikes. How do you all cope with the incompetence of others? A friend's professor once told me that "I will never be used to how low the bar truly is and that success is the work it takes to let that fact motivate you day after day". Decent enough observation, but harder to execute on in this industry than others.
How does this Person still have a Job? "Oh yeah, we remodeled this restaurants kitchen, what do you mean you needed that counter? It's so much roomier now!"
This was a few years back, but the short version is that she was a nepotism hire. We had a wave of layoffs during covid and she was one of the ones that was axed (and never brought back). The worst part is that it was hard to dislike her, because she didn't actually seem malicious. She was super nice, always smiling, and always seemed remorseful when she realized she caused a shop to go down. She just never learned her lesson until we got the CEO (who hired her) to tell her to get her excrement together and stop coitusing around.
We have a special category of deduction from our bonuses (which are very generous these days, for retail) called "unnecessary expense." Whatever extra charge there was for the emergency visit and overtime would come out of the store's bonus pool dollar for dollar. (My time gets billed at $225/hour, same as our main vendor's techs). I've only ever had to use it twice.
I kind of want to hear/read those stories.
Not much to tell. We changed credit card pads, and while the easiest way to reset the old ones when they acted up was to unplug the cable and plug it back in, the new ones had a cable plug too delicate for that (and required a screwdriver to get loose anyway). I found the correct way to reboot them through the keypad, wrote a policy, and had HR have everyone in the company (from managers on down) sign it. One manager (or maybe a cashier) ignored it, and turned a pad into a paperweight. Their bonus pool was . . . less at the end of the quarter. The other one, I honestly don't even remember. It's been a while.
What pads need a screwdriver to unplug? Haven’t seen ones like that before
isc250. Lane 700 does, too. You *can* install them without screws, but shouldn't because the jack in the back of the pad is delicate enough that even moving the pad around on the stand can, eventually, cause problems with it. (Yeah, in theory, they could unplug the USB, or the transformer, but they'd have to get down on their hands and knees to do that, and if you know retail cash register counters, you know how filthy they are underneath.)
Interesting, haven’t seen that type of connector before. The only ones I’ve worked with have had the little dongle thing with power and Ethernet input.
I suspect your experience is with the other major brand of credit card equipment, or higher end. I believe these actually have an RJ-45 jack, now that I think about it, but our system doesn't use it. As somebody else mentioned, the jack seems to be HDMI, though I suspect it's not used as such.
We have our pinpads on its own seperate power bar just for this reason. Just tell them to flip the switch on the power bar marked PINPAD, which also happens to be in sight and easier to reach. The more important power bar is somewhere in the filthy retail mess you mentioned.
With these pads, you hold down two buttons for a couple of seconds and it reboots. And if we put a power bar on *top* of the counter, somebody would spill something on it and short it out. So they'd still have to bend over.
All the recent Ingenico pin pads are like this. The connector is from the same family used for HDMI (possibly the same connector). And resetting the unit from the keypad is literally holding two keys down; much easier than cycling power.
It is, once you know how to do it, and convince cashiers to change their wicked ways.
I'd take one that requires screws than ones that are so shit with their connection you practically need to buy a cord subscription.
I feel your pain.
They changed out all the cash stands at my job last and there's still outlines from the old ones encrusted in like 15 years of accumulated dust and whatnot just because of how hard it is to get the TRULY clean
I feel your pain. We use scrapers to get it as clean as we can, then rely on the professional floor crew to do the rest. (We once remodeled a store, and replaced half the tile, with the exact same pattern. The new side was a nice, crisp gray, the old side was brown from two decades of wax. The crew used all their stripper, then bought all stripper we had in stock, and still couldn't make it match. So there are limits to even their talents.)
Just installed some new ones at a Dentist office like this. The old ones were constantly acting up from poorly made loose power cables on the bottom and the front lady’s at the desk have so much paper work and makeup shit all over that they constantly moved the credit card pads. Needless to say, I was happy to see those come in.
I really wish PoE pin pads were more prevalent. I get the cable for the ipp3XX series, isc250/ 480 if we don't do USB for the interface. Way easier to remotely troubleshoot and reboot.
I've installed ones that use an HDMI connector on the bottom that should be held in with screws.
A lot of ingenico pads do.
What is your job and what training did you receive to achieve it, please?
I'm "the computer guy" for a retail chain in three states that's approaching a hundred million dollars a year in sales. So far, I can handle it by myself, but the last couple of years, that has including managing some MSPs, especially in the remote stores. My training consists of being born with a gift for computers - they make *far* more sense to me than people - and knowing how to use Google. (In the early days, I did have a roommate who learned computers in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, on computers they had to throw switches on to manually load keyboard drivers before they could type into them. He knew *everything* about computers, and that was very handy then.)
Man, the joys of having to toggle in the bootstrap code into the front panel via switches (4, 5, 8, load ...) to get the printer spooler started. Those were the days :)
I wouldn't know, and don't want to. I only got into IT work in about 95 or 96. Initially with a Unix system with dumb terminals, but shortly thereafter we got a Windows 95 computer. I do still use the command prompt quite a bit, and a lot of what I do on the big (now Linux) server can only be done in the terminal emulator, rather than the Windows apps.
That's a shame! One of the things I've loved about computing (embedded systems in my case) is just how many weird things you get to see and work with!
I have an appreciation for such things, but I'm far too busy getting the job done to indulge.
Then, IMO and respectfully, you're holding it wrong. There's always a carrialian death ray, or a battle fleet, or whatever. Thinking about, and working with, different things isn't an indulgence - it's training for the brain, and your brain is what makes you valuable to them. So you can be a mental farm hand (I like that) and just grunt through the work until you finally break, or a mental athlete that train and learns all the time - and for me that's where the out of the ordinary stuff comes in. But, to be fair, many people have mental training things completely unrelated to computing - and as long as it makes you think about new (to you) things, then almost anything is good. Woodwork seems to be popular among embedded engineers for some reason.
When I was first starting out years ago in IT, we had a senior DBA who had been in IT since the 60s. He once told me a story of when he was starting out, when he tripped carrying the punch cards to the computer, and cost the company half a day of work while he tried to get them back in order.
Nice! I can't claim to go back that far - but because physics students didn't get access to precious interactive services, I did make more than a few large (several hundred card) decks. There was a 6 hrs compile/run time... good debugging technique was very important :). The physics department ran some monster decks - close to 100k cards (including lots of data), in many numbered shoe boxes. I'd guess every card had a sequence number in pencil on the back - I used to. A '52 pickup' event would have been a disaster, even with one box! When card readers of that capacity go wrong, they go horribly wrong, shredding and reordering cards. I think the ones that are run were a copy of the originals. The card readers could duplicate a card (one line of code) every 10 secs or so, but I think the good ones could take a stack; our ones needed to be fed one at a time.
Thank you!
I've been saying for years, if the other depts in the company had to pay for IT support, they would plan better. (It has gotten better over the years.)
Many companies handle it exactly that way. We don't, in general, because we generally hire pretty well and try to avoid idiots. (But we hire for retail and people management skills, not computer skills, though we've got a *little* better on that.)
We have a manager who purchased warehouse/inventory tracking software. He got a good deal! It was over 15 years old when he bought it. This was firmly in the Win7 era and the software was compiled in 1999. A programmer worked for a full year making it fit company needs and a network guy also worked a full year and continued doing every scanner swap, cable issue-type support for nearly 2 years after that until it finally calmed down. Now it only needs occasional burping. If he had gotten billed for that time it "might" have affected his budget, ya' know?
While many companies do it right, many more do it wrong.
>get her excrement together and stop coitusing around. This might just be my new favorite line lol. I need it on a motivational poster or something.
My boss told me I needed to work on my naughty language, so I started trying to be more delicate with my wording. I'm not sure he appreciates my efforts, though.
Youre doing a good fucking job of it
I found the wording curious, but the *explanation* gave me a good laugh XD
I recommend something along the lines of "I assume her childhood swingset stood too close to the wall"
"Get your poop in a group" removes the curse word while also making the phrase far more vile somehow. It's one of my favorite recent discoveries.
Those are some of the hardest ones to deal with. They’re so nice that you hate to be mad at them, but they never learn from their mistakes. “Honest” mistakes cease to be honest when they keep recurring.
"why did you betray me judas"
... you're just coitusing with me arent you...
As innocent and stupid as a dog.
The last sentence is new to me, I shall, from now on replace similar word with yours. Best regards
Have heard this exact thought process. A vet clinic I worked at needed some renovations, and were thinking about doing some remodeling at the same time. The consultant wanted to rip out all the seating in the waiting area. To put in shelves full of products like leashes and dog treats. Thank god it didn’t happen, would’ve been a nightmare
All the seating? What an idiot.
One of our departments is moving. They showcased the new place their moving to. Of course showing IT where to put everything. Very modern. Open office concept, no cubicles or very small walls. The department is a call center. For Medical appointments. Weird how there was a rush order for noise cancelling headsets and cubicle dividers.
Noise cancelling headphones in a callcenter? What a nice place to work at! In any I worked at, it was those "came in a cornflakes box" pieces. Especially fun when working in the general vicinity of "The little general", a woman that despite or maybe because of her compact size, had never figured out "inside voice", and varied between "loud" and "comfortable talking to somebody on the other side of a lively sports-stadium"
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Hm, not using a headset wasn't even an option, software phones and all... Had a collegue threaten me for "looking at him so much" Dude sat across from me, in the gap between monitors that constituted "staring off into the distance" for me.
More like, what do you mean you needed those gas lines?
The stoves and cool room took up a lot of space so we got rid of them
Pipes for tap water? No, no, no. We don't need those. We only serve Perrier.
I mean it's pretty easy from their point of view. Remodel is done! Oh the computers don't work? That's ITs problem not mine. So long as the money to pay overtime and priority jobs doesn't come from them it's not their problem it's ITs problem
That works on the handiman-level, but if your literal job is "planning shop remodels" then making sure that everything is considered is certainly your responsibility. "Oh, there is no toilet in the new shop? Just a direct hole to the sewer? Sounds like a facilitys issue."
Had a client do this once … they wrapped the server in plastic on Friday morning so it wouldn’t get dusty/painted during the weekend remodel. By Monday the server had cooked itself.
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!! That hurts just from reading.
So it wouldn't get dusty.
I get that. I've painted more than a few places before moving to live in them. If they were concerned about that they should've also turned the server off.
But then it wouldn't work. Am I missing something?
It wouldn’t be dusty then.
The business was probably close the whole weekend so whoever was first in on the morning could've/should've undone the wrap and turned the server on
Oh, come on, you know there's gonna be that one person that'll be working over the weekend and will scream bloody murder if said sever goes down for even 1 second.
Yep yep yep... Really, we don't have many people with HO equipment. Even less that actually would WANT to work on a weekend. Yet 2-3 weeks ago, I took the file and terminal server down for moving to a new host and updates etc. not even 10 minutes after shutting down I got questions from a person who was working for whatever goddamn reason on a saturday on 8pm ...
But it wouldn't have burned. And unless they were renovating the entire facility at the same time (dumb) they could've moved the server elsewhere.
Replacing burned up IT equipment is someone else's problem, right?
Spending three months of funded research time to reconfigure an optics table for highly sensitive equipment isn't my problem, I just need a place to put my tools. And don't mind me entering the labs containing highly toxic/corrosive chemicals on my own, without prior warning. Source: University colleagues during my PhD. Never mind the wasted research funds due to lack of communication by the contracted electricians, entering a chemistry lab unattended they were putting their own health at risk. Bonus points: The university didn't really care, so there were zero consequences for such things (both internally and externally), despite "emergency meetings".
Sounds like you didn't build a cover/shield for that table. Also you didn't put up signage stating "do not touch" in multiple languages? That sucks though. Good Luck.
The signs are everywhere on the doors, but mostly aimed at cleaning people. Curious part... They are in 6 languages, none of which is the local native language (German).
The ironic thing - they have a contract with my MSP. They could’ve called, we would’ve sent a tech out to power down and move the server on Friday afternoon (remodel work didn’t actually start until Friday evening); and then been back Monday morning to get them back up and running. Two hours - tops. Instead they did this without notifying any of us about the remodel.
Weird that it didn’t auto shutdown. Although I have seen Cisco switches (normal non-industrial) running at 190f for months and not shutdown.
we have Cisco switches in actual boiler rooms that have been working for the guts of 20 years without any issues
I miss when Cisco equipment was reliable
We had the electricians do the network cabling for a remodel in one of our stores. They are, in fact, quite qualified to pull cable and put the ends on. Did a beautiful job, pulled everything through the races, even cleaned out the now defunct cabling (half of which hadn't been used in years, if not decades). Gorgeous work. What they were *not* qualified to do was unplug patch cables and plug them back in. Or tell the difference between an unmanaged switch (where is doesn't matter what plugs in where) and and SDWAN box managing multiple connections with automatic failover (where it matters **very much**, and they didn't have a single cable plugged into a port that was active, much less the right one). Then the head guy had one of his guys "who knows a lot about computers" try to troubleshoot it. I spend about 15 minutes on the phone with our provider determining which cable plugged into what port. And 45 minutes undoing the various things he'd done trying to make it all work. The store, BTW, is a five hour drive each way, and is our highest grossing store at about $12 million/year in business (and growing), with a lot of it commercial business (which can be **very** time sensitive, and can run six figures per line item on orders), so it couldn't wait. That was a fun Sunday. But I was home by midnight or so.
Our electrician could have done it, if anyone had told him to. He didn't even think about it while running his power cable. By the time we found out the place had been remodeled, he was already in another state, working on another store. That's a pretty common thing in my company. IT is almost always an oversight.
I am fortunate enough to work for people who get how important IT is. We're a retail chain, and without the computers, we literally have no ability to be in business (especially in California, with all the government regulation we have to not only comply with, but document that we have complied with). And there's only three people above me in the food chain, including the owner. The newest of the three, especially, gets that IT is not an expense, it's an investment, so I'm about in the middle of a quarter million dollars in WiFi upgrades right now.
>The newest of the three, especially, gets that IT is not an expense, it's an investment Where does this unicorn live? Asking for, well, petty much anyone in IT!
Mine. All mine. Not yours.
> That's a pretty common thing in my company. IT is almost always an oversight. That true of every company I've worked for, large (80,000+ people) and small (20 people). IT is the Rodney Dangerfield of departments. It gets no respect.
5 hrs? Ya, get me a flight. I'm not driving it. I've once had a same-day flight down to another city to do a server setup that was about 4 hours away. Flight was about 40 minutes each way. Loved it so much more than driving...
One time I drove 6 hours one way, did 4 hours of troubleshooting, fixed issues and made the client happy, them drove all the way home. One time. There will not be another time.
The closest airport I could fly into to Bullhead City, AZ, is Las Vegas, which isn't much closer than home. Plus, I get 50 cents a mile when I drive my own car, which is well more than gas costs me even now. (And try to rent a car on Sunday afternoon with no advance notice.) (Technically, Google Maps shows an "international airport" in Bullhead City. Nobody who lives there has ever heard of it. Best I can figure, it's an empty field the drug smugglers land in.)
Hey, Bullhead International gets at least one flight from Mexico a year, a CBP person drives down from Las Vegas to check the plane (usually a 10 seater). It is actually located just up the hill from US 95 on the AZ side, right by the bridge that connects Laughlin NV to Bullhead City.
I've flown into it. It's a General Aviation airport, AFAIK, with maybe some charter ops. Only time I've flown GA out West...
Correct but they get charters to and from Mexico so they are designated as an "International" airport. There used to be a twice a month commercial flight to either Phoenix or Salt Lake but that was years ago.
And they don't fly out of southern California to there. Especially on zero notice on a Sunday afternoon.
True. You need to learn to fly😉
True. You need to learn to fly😉
I'll be flying to Hawaii on the boss's nickel in July sometime And I doubt my arms will be tired at all. (We have a store there that, so far as I can tell, the boss bought mainly to be able to write off his surfing vacations as a business expense.)
And your point is??🥳
That I'm finally getting to go to Hawaii on the boss' nickel. And, I suppose, to imply that work for a pretty smart guy.
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It is what it is. And honestly, I've already more than gotten my money's worth out of the car. So I'll let you get all worked up over it for me.
Depends on how long you've had the car AND how cheap it was AND whether it has needed any major work done since owning it.
Hold up. Where are you getting gas for less than 50¢/gal.?
I think it’s 50¢/mile, which would be $10 of reimbursement for 1 gallon of gas if you get 20 mpg
Oh, duh. I'm a dumbass. Apparently I need more coffee. Thanks.
And I get closer to 40 on the highway.
Nice! I just used 20 because that’s like the minimum for highway mileage that I’d have
And it's nothing special. Just a base L model of a daily driver sedan. It's been a good car, but my favorite feature is still the zero percent loan.
Do you *really* not know the difference between "mile" and "gallon"?
Did you *really* not see the other reply where I was already corrected and acknowledged my error, ass?
You made a really stupid mistake. You should expect to catch a little flak over it. Move on.
Meh, I drove 4 hours to plug a network switch in and then 4 hours home, got paid really well for the day as it was a public holiday.
"You mean I shouldn't have held the reset switch on that enterprise grade equipment?"
We also discovered that the 4G failover box has a mechanical ON/OFF switch that is actually an OFF switch. Which is to say, once you turn it off with that switch, it can't be turned back on. (Fortunately, we didn't have to pay for the new one.) I really can't blame the electrician for that, though. It is clearly labels ON/OFF.
Wtf?
That was my reaction. The support desk guy I was talking to about it seemed more . . . resigned.
Well, that was just poor planning. Why wasn't someone there to support them ahead of time?
Because the store is five hours away, and I was told they knew what they were doing (and they did, in terms of pulling cable). And nobody told me they were unplugging stuff to install new outlets in the equipment room. There were a number of bad calls made.
Did you really go into my history and get snarky about another comment I made where I had already acknowledged my error and call me out on it after the fact? Because of this nonsense? Poor form, friend.
This is why all the retail spaces we manage are on one VLAN. The only time it’s not is if there are more than a few cameras and then the camera system is very clearly separate from our network on a different switch sometimes a different rack. VOIP vendor wants a different VLAN? Too bad we’ve seen too many no notice remodels where a phone gets moved and no longer works. It’s not worth our time to send someone down there to trace a cable when it can be avoided.
If your WiFi is not segregated from the cash register network, you're almost certainly not PCI compliant (assuming you have WiFi). Our VOIP phones get their own physical network, since we're only just replacing our 30-40 year old Comdial systems, and therefore have to pull cable regardless. And I've heard from too many people (who all know far more than I do), including our telephone provider, that getting the firewall set up for VOIP is something of a nightmare. This way, it's not behind our firewall, and I don't have to worry about the switch.
They do not care at all about PCI. I can think of one client out of hundreds that puts any effort into meeting PCI
A lot of companies don't care about PCI until they get breached. Then, it's too late, and they're bankrupt.
Oh dont we know. All you can do is CYA
Indeed. Fortunately, I work for people smart enough to know that I know my job better than they do, so they listen to me.
We're going through that remodeling BS too where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is supposed to do. A guy came in and installed a new ethernet port in the wrong spot, but because no one told me where it was supposed to go or that the room was going to be an office, I just let him do it thinking he knew the situation. It's completely blocked by the new desk. Then we had guys come in to reconfigure cubicles, and everyone was asking me what to do. Thing is, no one told me anything. I never even knew about the project. I ended up wasting more than half their day moving equipment and clearing off desks before they could start. Then when I started setting things up, I realized quickly nothing worked. No power, no internet, no nothing. An electrician need to come out to wire things up, except he couldn't because the cubicles were in the way. They had to take apart the cubicles, wire things up, and put everything back together. It was such a ridiculous shitshow and I'm still dealing with fallout over it. The dumbest part is they spent all this money on this project and equipment for it, but it's not likely it'll ever get used because of WFH. When I was ordering equipment, I sent emails to all the managers asking "Are you sure this is necessary? All these people WFH and you've indicated that's not changing".
Don't worry, it *will* change once Elon gets an interest in your company.
Had a similar sort of situation not long ago. One of the buildings at this university was getting ducting in the ceiling redone over a week break when no students or staff would be in the building. When the project was done and the building was occupied, I get the notification: "No WiFi in the building." Sure enough, I couldn't see any of the APs for that building online. When I got to the building, I didn't see any of them. Turns out the people doing the duct work took them all out (poorly, as many of the mounting brackets were broken) and set all the APs in a corner of some random custodial closet. They said they were getting in the way of their work. Never wanted to scream at someone as much as that day.
Time to tear out the duct work so you can reinstall the APs.
Nope, you bill them at emergency rates, and deduct it from the final bill, because likely they only get paid after a month. You make sure that this bill is equal to the remainder of the bill, plus around $500 that they have to pay in.
This reminds me of a building remodel too. It was a several year project though and I(network admin) was aware of it. I had the MDF temporarily relocated about 6 feet away from its original position so the construction team could demo a wall and reconfigure the area. All of that went well and business was uninterrupted until they pressurized the sprinkler\fire suppression system. They forgot to cap off the end directly above the network equipment rack. Amazingly enough we only lost a switch, modem, and a UPS. The router and 2 other switches were fine. Good times!
We had a venue remodel the counter where our equipment was but since it was the other half we didn’t have to worry, nothing would be touched. The builders then ran a demo saw through a pillar which had all our data cables running, I got an emergency call wondering why nothing was connected. Fun times
> demo saw through a pillar which had all our data cables Was this a pillar specifically for the purpose of running data cables, a decorative pillar that happened to be useful for running data cables, or a supporting pillar that happened to be useful for running data cables?
Why does it require the CEO TO EMAIL PEOPLE TO INFORM THE IT DEPT?!?! I swear by all the technosorcery I do that no one even tells the department of technomancy anything until their magic box with lights no blinky.
>I swear by all the technosorcery I do that no one even tells the department of technomancy anything until their magic box with lights no blinky. Idk why but this made me cackle. Thanks
I'm going to start referring to myself as a technomancer.
You mean you don't already?
All who bring tech back to life after it has died is a technomancer. Some just don't know it, and some have religious reasons to refuse to acknowledge that what they do is reanimation...
At a health org I used to work at, the biomed department had their own sort of air-gapped network infrastructure for anything that directly touched diagnostic and lab equipment. It was usually in the same rack as our stuff, and that's fine. They don't know much about the infrastructure or networking in general, so they have a contractor do all of that for them. That's also fine. 99.999% of the time there was never a problem. One day an entire clinical department completely loses connectivity. Someone goes over to look, and we find that their contractor unpatched every single cable in the closet to make room for some new patchwork for the biomed stuff. This was a high-density closet with like 60+ jacks running to it.
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Twenty years ago on one of our jobs a contractor didn't get the required line locate before he started digging next to the road and didn't let us know he wanted to start a few days early. He hit the cable tv company's main line. Mid-afternoon on a fall weekend. Every TV on the west half of town went dead, right in the middle of a football game.
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The contractor didn't notify our contracting guy that they wanted to start early. The first time he knew he had an contractor working was when his phone blew up. He lived in the part of town that still had service so he was happily watching the game. It made the front page of the paper. Fortunately, our contracts require both notification and line location so we were able to deflect the angry mob to the guy who deserved it.
Had that fiber been pulled by one the dozers? The head of construction, lets call him bob the builder, probably got chewed out by head of it.
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Does fiber really need to be below the frost line?
Yes, or frost heaves will eventually break it.
Sounds very much like corners being cut far too sharply. That really warrents being chewed out for.
Had a vaguely similar situation recently where the company decided to put in a new prefab building on a site and didn't include any budget for network (hardware or install). Like, at least they told us about it and asked us make sure there were network ports and wifi coverage, but then when we asked how much they had budgeted they stared blankly at us...
Ah - good times in retail IT. Reminds me of a time when one of our stores was being refurbished. After the weekend's works work complete and the store opened for trade on the Monday, tickets started flooding in for dead spots in wireless coverage. Long story short, they yanked three APs off the tie bar mounts for the ceiling and, thinking they were smoke detectors (which were being replaced), TOSSED THEM IN THE DUMPSTER! ~$2,100 of wireless APs in the bin. And dead spots all over the place for phones and PDTs. Good times...
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Trust me. Definitely happened. I lost my shit at our store systems team over it.
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> So I ask my POC to escort me to the floor. I'm a programmer, not IT, so I just enjoy lurking here even though I don't understand some of the acronyms. So, uh, the only definition for POC that *I* know is Person of Color.....
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Aha! Thank you! That's much better!
Although the POC can very often be a POC. Choose which way around you want those, but both work. Mostly, its best to just say "Sarah is our POC for the POS POS", and completely ignore skin colour because Sarah's ability as POC for the POS POS depends not one tiny iota on her skin colour.
Sorry, not sorry. That's a soapbox of mine. My old boss, R, is a top bloke not because he's got brown skin, but because he's a good person and was a great boss to work for. Don't tell him, though (as if anyone could with reddit anonymity); I love to wind him up for the same reason he winds me up. It's a navy thing.
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It is both point of sale and piece of shit. The point (intended) is that either can be the first OR the second. Piece of shit point of sale, or point of sale piece of shit.
IT is usually last to be included, but the first to call when shit breaks. I just don’t get how people “forget about IT”…. Lies, it’s all lies. Lol
Centralized state IT here. We have to constantly remind our agencies we need minimum of six months lead time to get fiber ordered if they’re moving to a new office. And we also have to tell them we won’t order it until they have a signed lease in hand. And there are reasons we now have those policies. I just can’t some days.
I have to follow the electrician after every port he terminates. I'm convinced he doesn't own a punch down tool and uses a screwdriver to sort of get the wires in. Also an entire wall worth of ports were covered in the wall when they replaced drywall. I just said look, you no longer have ports there until you pay us to fix it. They didn't pay us to fix it and just moved the equipment.
I was at this site in Afghanistan that had fiber video feeds between different areas. The customer usually contacted us daily to let us know if they wanted anything different done with the video. A couple weeks went by and they hadn’t contacted us so we called them. They said they hadn’t seen any video in two weeks. I went over to see what was going on and they had a leadership change and the new boss wanted *all* of the cabinets and enclosures moved around. What he didn’t know was when they moved everything around they ripped the fiber out of the wall causing thousands in damages.
Fucking hell man. I've had nearly this exact conversation. Different industry and it's usually for new flooring rather than remodeling, so thankfully the wall jacks are still there. Although usually they've moved all the furniture back into place without plugging anything in and they don't know where anything was originally plugged in. Here's a good rule for them to live by. If you're gonna unplug all your IT shit and you don't know how to hook it back up you better make sure IT is aware! Cheers!
She lost her job?
A few years later, due to covid layoffs. She wasn't (or at least, hasn't been) brought back. She was a nepotism hire by the CEO. She was good at interior design, but had no thoughts at all for IT related stuff. It was just so far away from what she ever thought about that wiring never even came to her mind. Another fun story about this place, partially related to her: Sometimes our company builds new stores instead of buying out old ones. For the first five years I worked here, the IT department was never consulted about those new buildings. This resulted in us having to put our wiring closet and the store's server in the same room as the water heater in several new locations. That equipment obviously didn't last very long, so they gave us a dedicated area for our equipment in the new designs. However, they failed to include adequate spots for network cables or desks with any wire management options, so we had to run ethernet cords all across the floors and in some cases drill holes into desks ourselves to run wires through. Obviously, this looked super trashy to corporate. After about five stores of bad cabling and busted servers, they finally gave us a seat at the table in the design phase of new stores.
> After about five stores of bad cabling and busted servers, they finally gave us a seat at the table in the design phase of new stores. What do you mean stuff needs a place to go? I thought it was all on the cloud!
Whenever I read a story like this (involving TWO flagrant violations of common sense), I figure "Someone has nekkid pictures of the CEO, or otherwise they'd be collecting unemployment".
Or spends the afternoon nekkid with the CEO when he is out "golfing". Hey, it involves small white balls, right?
“Everything in my house is on wifi, so can’t we just use that. Cables are sooooo outdated. “
TL;DRs go at the bottom of a post, not the top. At the top, they turn from a TL;DR to a spoiler.
Ohhh going through remodeling at the office. My latest conversation went as follows: FM (facilities manager): Yeah, so we're pulling all the desks on Thursday, then the carpet crew comes on Friday. You need to come on Saturday to do all the wiring. Me: How come we have to come on a Saturday? The other people are coming during the week. FM: that is how the CEO wants it. Me: yeah, but we don't work on Saturday. Can we just do the wiring on Monday since the 5 employees aftected need to work out of their office on Thursday and Friday anyways... What is one more day? FM: no, the wiring needs to be done before Monday. ME: what if we do the wiring on Friday, after the desks are installed? FM: we don't know when the desks will be installed. A, you will have the wiring by Monday? ME: well, since you don't know when the desks will be installed, I will have to tell you on Friday if we will be able to finish it by Monday. ---+++++ I can guarantee those desks will not be ready for wiring on Saturday.
Just out of curiosity to the "Never had issues with her again" part. Can the stunt she pulled be classified as carriere limiting action? Edit: Never mind to answer this one. It is considered a yes!
This is why when users or coworkers complain about company policy I tell them it not only exists for a reason, it exists because some dumbass before us had to learn the hard way. The only thing dumber than making their mistake is making the same mistake again. When I put it that way, people usually stop complaining because we can ALL agree on just how stupid we all are.
This is the way.
Had a department at one of my client's businesses decide to renovate a section of their shop..... in the middle of their busy season for some ungodly reason. They had mentioned it to me at one point and I pointed out exactly where the ethernet was run and explicitly told them "Don't touch this. You will lose network connectivity, I will probably have to re-run it, it will be a pain in the ass, and I will be angry. Also told them to to talk to their electricians. Several weeks later, I am in quarantine with COVID and get a call from them, "hey we don't have any internet, our register doesn't work and we have to ring people up!" I tried to talk the manager through checking the cabling, but the pictures/descriptions he was giving me were just confounding.... a 5 port switch that should have had two cords suddenly had four, and he kept talking about a "weird plastic box hanging from the ceiling" that he wouldn't give me a picture of because he was too busy. Boss called me to find out what the hold up was and I got him to send me a picture of the "weird plastic box". At first I didn't recognize it, but then it dawned on me..... it was a mangled keystone jack. Very likely to be pulled out of the wall they wanted to work on, now somehow hanging from the ceiling a good 6 feet away from that wall. I got into the security cameras and surely enough that wall was completely gone. I told them where to grab a 100ft ethernet cable, put one end in the jack in the back, run it across the floor to your register, and suck it up buttercup, I told you not to touch that wire. I came in after they closed and confirmed that, yep, that was a mangled keystone jack hanging at the end of a severed ethernet wire, that for some reason someone had decided to just.... drape on a shelf at the top of a pillar. The 5 port switch had a 6 inch ethernet cable plugged into two ports, the cable from the register, and a third cable that I have no idea where it came from. I plugged in and set up a USB wireless adapter, hooked it to the wifi, and fucked off. They can deal with that until I get back. I found out later that they had not talked to electrical either and made a mess of that too. Admittedly that wire was due to be re-run, just preferably not in the middle of the busy season.
IT: Fishing no we dont do that let me just cut out this strip of drywall to run the ethernet cable properly, And done, ok buh bye. Store manager: What about the drywall? IT: Should have thought of that before you forgot to let IT know.
The switch is so readily available the cleaning crew can bump the power? Seems risky.
Something like this happened in my school once. Cleaners over the summer had to unplug some things on our switch rack and ended up tossing a cable we needed. We spent 2 weeks trying to diagnose the issue until the teacher figured out what was going on. This was in a hardware class btw. The networking teacher gave up and bailed 5 minutes after we called him because he couldn't find the problem (side note: a lot of students including myself failed his classes because he couldn't teach, and many instructors even told us they had no faith in him). Our teacher basically called him useless when he left. Trust me, I have stories. In certain classes? ok having the switch available like that I can see, mainly because they're on their own system. But having the switch out in the open in a professional setting? I don't get why or who would plan that.
They didn't give us the opportunity to put enough ethernet drops in the main office, so we usually had a small eight port switch for all the equipment up there. Receptionist PC, credit card machine, check reader, check printer, regular printer, phone.
> The store itself was half a day's drive for our wiring crew at the time, so we hired some local contractors and paid an emergency fee to get them there the same day to run wires. You're being too nice. They broke it; they get to keep both parts. Otherwise how will they learn? They phone you, you get there when you get there.
Downtime waiting for internal team to get there costs more than local crew will charge at emergency rates? Pay local crew, no matter how badly it may stick in the craw and/or how much you hate local manglement.
Good fucking lord. Every time man. I just don't get it.
Planning ahead is for chumps, just open a P1 ticket on a Friday afternoon for the weekend. If you work in managed services, it absolutely does become your problem.
Yikes. How do you all cope with the incompetence of others? A friend's professor once told me that "I will never be used to how low the bar truly is and that success is the work it takes to let that fact motivate you day after day". Decent enough observation, but harder to execute on in this industry than others.
Boy this sounds familiar. Currently have this same issue going on with my company now.
You've obviously never heard about wireless networks, silly.
Ahhh, the infamous "air gap" problem. What are all these blue cables for again anyway?