My life is starting to calm down a little and things at the hospital are going decent. Not well, but as good as can be expected. One morning I was sitting at my desk waiting for the clock to hit 8:30 the next person to help when my boss, $JimCarrey, walked up to my desk

$Jim: Hey, we have a new hire starting that we're going to match up with you and $Mark so you'll each have someone working with you 2 nights every week.

With $Mark and I sharing a night on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning that means there would only be 1 night where we'd actually be alone. At first I thought it was because one of us was screwing up but neither one of us was given bad yearly reviews so I doubt that was it and the extra help would be nice since they're dumping more projects on those of us working third.

Around the corner comes $Martin. FSCK You probably remember him from the Munchausen postings. So either he got shitcanned Fired, or he quit. Either way I was not looking forward to working with him. Might as well try and make the best of it. Monday night he starts with me and I begin training him, showing him how to find users within the Citrix AppCenter, training refreshing him on Active Directory, where our spare inventory is, how to deploy jobs via Altiris, where our knowledge base is. He gets his first call and it's a nurse on Z51 that has a phone that's not showing anything on the display. A little side note about our hospital, we have the main tower which houses patients which is labeled Zone and then floor 1, so first floor is Z11, second floor is Z21 and so on all the way up to Z91. We do have 10 floors but the 10th floor is a creepy area where the elevator motors are stored.

I instruct him to have her pull the ethernet cable, count to 10 and reseat it. I also have him get the model number from the nurse....it's a 7961. Double FSCK We have NO 7961's in stock.

The difference between a 7961 and a 7941 is the number of lines it has, 61 has 6 lines, 41 has 4. We have TONS of 7941's but they decided to replace the 7961's with 8861's which is fantastic except they haven't ordered a single 8861. Not 1. So I tell $Martin to go grab a 7941 and wait for her to call back and if it didn't work then we'd have to build it in Cisco Unified Admin console and to wait for me as I was called down to ED for a WOW that wouldn't power on.

The WOW was a pretty quick fix, they get in a rut where they don't want to boot and all you have to do is disconnect the power cable to the backup battery on the bottom of the housing, pull the battery, give it a 10 count and power it back on. I've shown the nurses how to do this but they forget, job security I suppose. I get that done and get back to the office and $Martin is gone and there's no phone on his desk. phew Thankfully the powercycle worked. I settle back down in my seat and comb through the bucket for something easy I can toss his way when I see the top 2 tickets with the most recent activity are his. One was for the phone and one was for a port that Z71 wanted live. I don't remember showing him the network closets and while there is a folder linked on our sharepoint site with the locations I doubt he was smart enough to go looking on our portal for that. Maybe $Jim showed him where they were at.

30 minutes later he comes walking in and sits down without saying anything. I decide to pry a litte

Pavix: I saw you had a ticket for turning a port live. How did that go?

Martin: Oh, it went ok.

Pavix: Oh? I always have a problem because there aren't very many free ports

This was true. I typically recommend a 80% utilization process where if the switch ports are 80% used then you should drop in another switch and try to even out the load. This hospital in most places does a eh, screw it process where they don't add new switches because it's part of a project which I suspect is a fancy way for them to say "Not my problem, you deal with not having enough ports" without actually saying it.

Martin: Yea, there wasn't any free ports so I just plugged it in to the switch where I could.

Pavix: Meaning you unplugged something to plug in the port you needed?

Martin: Yep

I have no problem with this, I've had to do this before but I had to ask...

Pavix: Did you check to see if the port was active?

Martin: Check it how?

Pavix: Well, typically the link light will be lit on the switch if it's being used

Martin: Oh, nope.

Pavix: Did you write down what port and on what switch you unplugged?

Martin: Nope.

Pavix: Did you write the port number down?

Martin: Yep. But I threw it away in the cafeteria garbage when I was done

Great. So now I get to go write down the port number off the wall plate, go hunt down the port on the patch panel then trace it back to the switch and replug in whatever he disconnected. I find the port, get the port number, go to the patch panel and trace from one end of the cable back to the switch. I unplug the cable and plug in the old cable and it immediately gets a link light. Of course he disconnects something that is actually active. So I hunt for a port that doesn't have it's link light lit, I trace it back to the patch panel and find the port is in a conference room. I disconnect that and plug in the new port while documenting what switch I put it on and what port it's in and email the floor manager to let her know the conference room port will be unusable. I get back to my desk and there's an empty 7941 box on his desk

FSCKING HELL

I told $Martin that if he replaces a phone the new phone will need to be built unless it's the exact same model in which case the MAC address can be updated. But this is not the case, they're different models of phone so the new one will have to be built after we make sure they're not using 6 lines. Just about the time I'm trying to figure out how to murder get rid of $Martin he walks through the door.

Martin: Hey, I had to replace that phone but it should be fixed now.

Pavix: Did you build the new phone in Unified?

Martin: No. I plugged it in and it powered on. It's all good

Pavix: No, it's not all good. The phone doesn't know what numbers should ring on it, it doesn't know that the old one is decommissioned.

Martin: Listen bro, the phone knows what to do based on the port it's plugged into

Pavix: Umm, what? Ok, did you get the MAC of the new phone? Where is the old phone?

Martin: I don't need the MAC. I decommissioned the old phone and put it in the decomm closet.

Pavix: Did you write down the MAC of the old phone?

Martin: No.

So I head up to 5th floor, grab the MAC off the new phone and then head to the decomm closet. Thankfully there was only 3 7961's so I write all the MACs down as well as their corrisponding asset numbers since I know $Martin didn't decomm the old phone in Symantec. By the time I get back to my desk $Martin has taken 3 calls from Z51 saying the new phone isn't working

No shit, sherlock

And my luck being what it is, the phone I needed was the last one checked. Thankfully the phone didn't need 6 lines, it only had 2 lines and no speed dials. I build the new phone, remove the old phone from the lines and then decommission it out of Unified and SMP.

To keep my head from exploding $Martin from trying to help more I told him he needs to count the crappy plastic USB hubs from the old WOWs in the decomm closet and test each one for usability.