Hey TFTS! I was moping around the other day bemoaning the fact that I’m not going into a field that will supply me with ready material for one of my favourite subs when it occurred to me, I already have a story that I can share with you all. It requires a bit of a back story and setting up that I hope you don’t mind, so settle in and ready your minds for my one and only tech support related major head desk. Any major spelling/grammar mistakes are my own and I have no excuse for.

Three or four years ago the church I was going to had quite a bit of money thrown its way to update it into the 21st century, this included a new building, a new sound system and a new network. At the time I was (volunteering/)working as second in charge in the ‘tech team’, a team of five or so people that was basically responsible for making sure the slideshow worked and the microphones made sound when they needed to.

It just so happened that the leader of our tech team was also the only IT guy on site for the ‘social outreach’ side of the church, this made many people assume that the jobs were one and the same despite him being paid for one role and technically just being a volunteer for the other.

A few week after we got our shiny new building all set up our tech team leader moved away, something we knew was coming, and he put me (all seventeen years and ten months of me), in charge of our little tech team. I was the only person anywhere near qualified/motivated to lead the team at the time, as strange as it sounds the best option was putting a teenager in charge of a team of adults. Due to budgeting things and other factors that I am not aware of another on site person IT was not hired. Instead they decided that the district IT service combined with vaguely trained people on site would be enough to keep a vital server and 20 computers on site running smoothly.

I want to meet whoever decided this and introduce their head to their desk, hard.

Everything went smoothly for about a week after the original IT guy left. One fateful Wednesday I decided, since I was on holidays from school, that I would sort out the horror that our equipment cupboard had become after the move.

I’d barely gotten through the front door before my mother (head of the social program side of things) asked me if I could come and have a look at the ‘server and stuff’ because ‘we haven’t been able to connect to the internet since late afternoon and the phones have been down since then too’. I told her that I had zero experience with servers and networks but I would see what I could do. After trying a few things to make sure it wasn’t something simple I picked up the phone to the church’s district IT service to see if they could walk me through some more complex troubleshooting.

In the mean time my mother called up the ISP (in case there was line outage causing it all) and since the church had a business account they said they’d send a tech around to test our lines in the next 4-6 hours. Really handy when you needed to be online by an hour ago, but I get the techs have other jobs to do.

After going through all the basic steps again with the phone tech and relaying what lights were flashing on the switches (patchboard? I don’t know all the proper jargon still!) we determined that there was some noise coming from somewhere in the system clogging everything up. He asked me to log onto the server from the terminal we had set up.

CastleNation: That might be a little difficult.

Tech: Why’s that?

CN: The last IT guy left without telling us the password

After much swearing on both our parts he told me

Tech: Ok, we’re doing this the hard way.

CN: Ok, what do I need to do

Tech: While I’m chasing down a way to get into your server, you get your boss to get the old IT guy to cough up the password in case I can’t find a way in and you start labelling all 200 of the blue cords coming out of your switch. Unplug them all, power cycle the rack and start plugging them back in one by one. We’ll fix this one way or the other.

An hour later I’ve figured out which port it was coming from (something around the 120’s from memory) and I talk to the building manager to get the plans where he’s written down the location of every ethernet plug….only to discover he doesn’t have a hard copy, the only copy is on the network shared drive.

Another good half an hour later I eventually discover the demon port, I unplug the ethernet cord to trace it back to the faulty equipment that has been causing so much trouble only to find the other end of the cord also plugged into an ethernet port.

Apparently the network had gone down just after a guest from another branch of the church had left. The office staff had a free ethernet cord hanging around (for reasons inexplicable to me) they lent to guests so they could do work on their laptops while visiting. This guest, when leaving, had tried to be helpful and had plugged the loose end into the wall on their way out.

And managed to bring down an entire network from 4pm the previous day to around 2pm Wednesday, time in which people coming in who were in need could only get very limited assistance and employees could do next to nothing.

I called the IT guy back and let him know the problem had been resolved so that he could close the ticket.

A week after that anyone vaguely tech competent was sent to mandatory IT training to try and stop anything like this from happening again and maybe give them the basic skills to fix it if it did.

No new IT guy was hired.

I made threatening signs and confiscated all the loose ethernet cables I could find, trusting only my mother with their secret location. Shit hit the fan less often than I thought it would, but I suspect we might have had a guardian tech looking over us, fielding frequent calls from my mother and helping her patch everything back together with her (self admitted) limited computer skills.

I understand why you all drink now, writing this all down has made me want to join you under the table.

TL;DR: FLYING MONKEY HAVE NO NETWORK EXPERIENCE, FLYING MONKEY LISTENS TO ORDERS FROM GOOD WITCH, ALL IS WELL IN OZ (MOSTLY)