It's summer, the time of year at this large wholesale plant nursery when business is slow and supervisors decide to spiff up their work areas, reports an IT pilot fish there.
"Shortly after this particular office's re-do, we started getting complaints at the help desk from users that their printer would only work intermittently and their Internet was extremely slow now," fish says.
"We checked things out by pinging the IP addresses and could confirm that there were indeed dropped packets.
"So we went about our business of checking routers between the server in the main building and the rest of the network all the way to that particular office, starting at the server end.
"We didn't have any packet loss until we went into the office -- which was looking great, by the way -- and connected downstream of the switch in their office.
"It was only then that we looked at the cabling in the room and noticed that, to get it up off the floor, they had taken a desktop stapler and stapled the wire to the sheet rock above the mop board at the floor.
"We replaced the wiring in the room, which restored the network connections back to the pre-cleaning stage. We then instructed the supervisor to direct his staff not to use a stapler on the network wiring again."
SPECIAL NOTE FROM SHARKY: Welcome to Sharky's new home! (Unless you're here before noon Eastern time on Tuesday, Aug. 26. In that case, welcome back to Sharky's soon-to-be-ex-home.) If all goes well, Computerworld's new website goes live at high noon, including the Sharkives -- but not all the Sharkives' comments.
Don't panic -- that's actually the plan. All those comments will be restored to the Sharkives soon.
For now, feel free to explore the new Computerworld site. (Unless it's before noon Eastern time, in which case get ready to count down to the launch. It's like New Year's Eve -- except in August, at noon, and with everyone waiting to see whether anybody drops the ball.)
And in the meantime...
Connect with Sharky.Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll snag a snazzy Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.
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