A friend in southern California
is an IT geek of sorts- that is, he knows just enough to be able to fool people who don't know any better into thinking that he knows what he's doing. In his defense he's learning at a pretty good rate and does take lessons from his errors, but nonetheless he has gotten his jobs over the years more by bold lies than by shading the truth.

One company he worked for had four buildings in a complex. It was the mid 1990s, and networks were not that common yet. Still, this company wanted to be ahead of the curve, so they hired him to network the buildings.

I give Jeff credit- he ran a load of lines between buildings through the pipes that were in place for the internal phone lines, until he had a bundle the size of my thigh that he ran upstairs to a router that was hooked into the biggest machine he could build at the time. It had a couple of very large drives for data storage, one serving as a mirror for the other, and they used Novell to run it. The thing ran, and the bosses were pleased.

That is, until there was a thunderstorm. A lightning strike somewhere nearby was apparently enough to get through those cables and blow the router. Suddenly a couple hundred machines were isolated, and the files they had been working on were pretty much destroyed.

In retrospect what he should have done, of course, was to have a server in each building and have those networked together with a central machine that simply acted as communication with the others. He figured that out later, but at the time he was up to his ass in alligators dealing with pissed off people trying to save to a network that had gone up in a puff of acrid stench. He tried to send an email to everyone explaining what had happened- but he was trying to send it across the network.

D'oh.

He was sacked shortly thereafter, but he learned quite a few lessons from his SoCal networking gaffe.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 11 Sep 2008, 19:51, 3 replies)

wow
an almost entirely relevant pun!


I am amazed.


'tis quite good too
(bamboozled Can hear you getting fatter, Thu 11 Sep 2008, 20:40, closed)

That
Is the tightest punnage i have ever witnessed..

A* Click.
(AndyC4m Eject Eject [><], Fri 12 Sep 2008, 11:23, closed)

Thank you.
I thought I'd try the subtler approach and see what happened. But I imagine that ultimately I'll have to come up with a Pooflake-style wad of awfulness...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 12 Sep 2008, 13:08, closed)