About 12 years ago I worked for a shipping company as sysadmin.  As such, it was my responsibility to make suggestions on how to protect, improve, etc. all IT equipment.

We were coming up on labor union contract talks and I had given the C-level a lot of things IT needed before the talks began. I was able to get most of my requests fulfilled, with exception of  moving the server room and placing all of our cables within conduit.

The server room at the time was an old office.  This was adjacent to the warehouse and break rooms.  The majority of our cabling ran along the edge of the warehouse and was visible to everyone.

On the night the negotiation failed and the union walked out, I get a call from the night shift plant manager that things had gone terribly wrong with the network.  I asked what was wrong, and he told me that I just needed to come in.

So when I arrived, “someone” had driven a fork truck through the side wall of the server room and destroyed our new Alpha VMS server (110K purchase – 2 weeks old), not only that, our fiber link which ran to back part of the plant had been severed, and of course, no one knew who did it nor how it happened.

We were down and couldn’t ship or receive orders.  The C-levels kept looking at me as I tried to assess the damage and get an idea of cost for repairs.

Well after about a week, not only did we have a new server room (and the plant’s network back up and running), the C-level actually sent me and my entire team to a nice dinner with family.

From that point on we pretty much got whatever we needed when it came to IT.

-NICE resolution…you sure that you don’t have forklift hours under your belt? 🙂  – Rob

Picture Source: [mikecogh (CC)]