Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
Sometimes I am reminded, that my country does not hold monopoly on incompetent idiots.