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And under the desk no-one can see you unplug if necessary.

"And under the desk no-one can see you unplug if necessary."

yes wasn't plugged in under the desk!!! Will take 20 mins (or however long it takes me to go to the patch room and check/plug that end in to the switch then login to the switch and ensure the port is configured).

to be fair, in those days it likely was Token Ring so not quite a case of just pushing it in or it accidentally falling out.

Obligatory Dilbert . . .

https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe9bBjJx4Lo

fill in your own IBM acronym interpretations below

An internal one from one of their re-org periods: I've Been Moved

It's Being Mended

Mainly from the PS/2 days

I Be Movin on...

I Bribed Management

Obvs

Inefficient But Marketable.

I've been misled

It's not unknown for higher up sales bods not to know things (or basics) about the product they're selling. Many years ago my first job was as a placement student at a well-known company that makes cash machines/PoS/etc. One of my fellow placement students was in sales and told me of a higher salesbod who could quite happily flog loads of computer kit, but using a mouse was a bit beyond him.

In all fairness he's probably be pitching to other higher ups who also probably couldn't use mice either. All their underlings and sales tech support could work out the detail I'm sure!

Knowledge of the product may, in some cases, risk the sale.....

Also in fairness cash machines are usually mouse-free.

...it is not something I'd expect a typical user to have thought to check. And if the clip was broken on the plug, it'd be all to easily pulled out of the socket.

I once had to install some video conferencing kit at Barclay's in Northampton. I knew next to nothing about the kit but between myself and a guy on our helpdesk who'd at least seen it before we got it all set up. Bear in mind this was the early/mid 90's so it was ISDN based.

It was very high end for the day as well - the camera tracked the speaker as they moved around etc. and there was even a mini-mixing deck for the audio.

Anyway, my colleague and I did a handful of test calls each way and all was good. I brought the director in to see and show her it was working and she was happy and signed the work off.

A few days later, I got a call to say said director had called in a huff to complain it wasn't working and denied ever seeing it thus so I had to drive all the way back to Northampton (about 100 miles or so each way).

It turned out the ISDN line was shared and also terminated in her office. When she was connected in there, then obviously the line wasn't usable in the meeting room. Always nice to be able to say it's still working when you use it right and you need to get something else sorted.

Had to go in to the office when connectivity failed after some desks have been moved a few feet due to C-19, "but they didn't change anything". They didn't, except for unplugging the LAN cable to the local switch* feeding all 8 desks.

*Too many desks, too few wall ports after multiple office layout changes. Easiest just to put a local PoE switch in to service the phones and PCs.

is that a switch or a hub?

My game must be getting old , i didnt see the blindly obvious user error coming .

I was about to post "dont take error messages at face value" !

Oh no it isn't

Oh yes it is.

I once had a similar issue at a firm with a site based in the countryside, as we knew there were rats/mice there we always asked them to test things by plugging in to a different port to be sure it was a new cable fault. This would be then followed by a call to the exterminator and cable guy to correct the issue. Unfortunately, one sales manager got 'smart' and instead of calling started just swapping peoples ports around then calling us, was just swapping peoples ports with the ports of someone who was not there. This fast ended up with them playing musical ports with anyone who was not in the office and lots of long cables being trailed over the floor. This carried on until someone did a heath and safety audit, then they tried to read us the riot act about the trip hazard...

I thought we would end up with the UTP cable plugged into another computer, or heaven forbid, back into the same computer with two NICs?

I once asked an engineern to trace a patch to see where it was going, as I suspected he had plugged an isdn card into a network port. After 10 minutes he reported in a very grumpy way "It goes to the wall". Another engineer took him away from my wrath and helped him trace it through two cabinets to a network switch.

Indeed, it goes... On, and on, and on... The head of our data center team insisted from June 10th until yesterday the cable at one of our AIX frames was "firmly plugged, with green lights". He refused to track the patch all the way to the switch. Cue In some irate phone calls until we had enough and dispatched a CE on site. Long story short, he was looking at the wrong expansion drawer, and the card in question was UNPLUGGED.

I said to my local manager I'd happily exchange my bonus for a round trip air ticket to have the chance to punch the guy in his face.

A different type of problem. My grand father was the boss of a construction company, and worked his way up to the board. He was on site and a bright new, straight from university kid was showing off his knowledge, and upsetting the rest of the team. They had a problem. The pump to get the water out of the foundations was not working - or rather the pump was working - but no water came out of the hose pipe. The crew stood and watched the kid fail to get it working.

My grandfather came on site as part of an inspection, and told him to turn the hose pipe round. The kid said it would make no difference. My grandfather said just do it or get off site. They turned it end to end and lo - it worked.

The reason was, inside the hose pipe was a liner. If it was old, it tended to come way from the walls. With water flowing one way it just pushed the liner against the walls. If water went the other way the liner acted as a plug.

When we had a problem with a printer cable - we turned it round and it worked ....

That type of fault is described as "insufficient conductivity in interface between network cable and wall socket... by about 2ft"

Pranked 2 people at once though.

Had an old cable that had been cut, so tied it with a reef knot. Replaced the boss's working cable with the cut one. When he came in, he complained he couldn't log in, and I said the Network guy was the person to ask as he'd been busy cabling. The Network guy rolls up, takes a look and starts laughing. Pulls the cable and shows it to the boss, and I just said "There you go, typical networking job"!

Fun days!

Although in my case it was a teachers work room, where all network was down after the summer vacation. And half an hours from my office.

So before I even got into the car I looked up swtich locations for the building, and prepared myself for a round of "trace that port". (I still do not understand why "wallplug - switch" port is never documented anywhere.)

Got to the teachers workroom, had a little chat with a smug teacher, that happened to be the teacher for one of my kids, and usually an intelligent and technically hands on kind of guy. Traced the cables to the wall to find the wall plug label, only to find that they were all unplugged.

I'll admit I had to let him know the cables really need both ends plugged in to work properly.

And then there are the jokers that put a piece of clear tape on the switch end of a cable just for laughs. Took a while to troubleshoot and find.

Or the late 90s. We had a network segment that randomly kept falling off the network for a few seconds at a time. The "fault" was eventually traced to one of the network guys stretching his legs under the desk and moving the cable just enough to break the connection. Then when he sat up straight it started working again.

Once had to deal with a PC that wasn't powering up. Luckily the department was fairly friendly and helpful to IT, so when they said they had check plugs and stuff I believed them.

As I walked up to the desk I could see the problem that no one had spotted. The computer was plugged into the dreaded 4 way extension cable and I could see that the plug for that was not fully in the socket (Thankfully UK plugs have a safetly latching to prevent sparking/discharge). However it was Friday and being in a mischievous mood I thought I'd have some fun.

I went through the motions of trying the front power switch, checking the power cable at the back of the PC, unplugging and plugging the PC back into the 4way adapter, obviously still nothing, so scratching my head I told the user I couldn't see any obvious issue and I would have to try something unorthodox .

I sat in front of the PC grasped the case with both hands with my finger on the power button, closed my eyes, started mumbling and rocking back and forth, then surreptitious I pushed the extension cable plug back in with my foot. Miraculous the machine sprung into life, I opened my eyes, got up, gave an enigmatic smile to the user and walked away.

Mythical IT Guru Level 10 achieved.

I really approve of desk columns with network connections mounted just below the power sockets for monitors/laptops.

Makes this kind of thing so much easier to fault find.

That is until you need more than 2 ethernet ports... Say for managing 4 switches and 2 routers. Lots of extra cable runs on loose hanging ports. At least the network bods ziptied the cables to the sockets.