It was a fine Saturday morning in the metroplex. I woke up to a brisk 64 ° and decided it would be a good day to head into the office and take care of some important details before the teachers arrived on Monday for a busy first week of school. I picked up my venti toffee nut latte, and drove into the beautiful sunrise as I headed up to the school. Little did I know what the day ahead would hold in store for me.
I arrived at the school, hot glue gun in hand, ready to start decorating my new office. And yes, that is a VERY important detail. And yes, the weekend is the only time I had to do anything for myself in my new office because I could already feel the bombardment of help desk tickets arriving in my inbox. The numerous "I forgot my password" requests still send chills up my spine. This would be my only chance, for at least a month, to hang my new curtains, arrange my clipboards, and add a dash of personality to the muted walls and fluorescent lights.
Since it was the last weekend before school started, I had hoped to be the only one in the building so that I could blast my 80s music. No such luck. My colleague, an older gentleman, was in the MDF room fiddling with the switches.
"John, what are you doing here?" I asked.
"Well, we've been having issues with the FiOS; ran a speedtest and it was only reading 5 when it should be 60, at least!" he replied.
"Do you need me to help you?"
"No, I believe I know the source of the issue. Give me 30 minutes and we'll test it again."
"Ok, well I'm going to put on some music."
I proceeded to open up Pandora, and let the lyrics of Steve Perry and Lou Gramm inspire me. The curtains were placed, and fluffed flawlessly, the rug had found its home in the middle of the room, and my newly acquired sitting area was laid out to perfection. As I was in the process of setting up my desk, the stream of music had been cut off. How dare they interrupt my session [for dramatic effect] at the climax of "Don't Stop Believin'"! I had lost my connection. I knew John was rewiring the switches, so I figured that had to be it.
"John, did you just pull a cord out from somewhere?"
"Why do you ask?"
"My connection was dropped."
"No, I haven't touched the wires in a while."
"Well, my laptop is on the wifi, let me try my LAN... Nope, still nothing. I'll call Verizon to see if something happened again."
Back-track: Six weeks earlier, we had experienced a similar problem, wherein the connection simply dropped. We called Verizon, they sent a tech out, and even he couldn't figure out what happened. Then, as if by magic, and to the astonishment of the tech, the connection re-appeared.
I proceeded to call Verizon and explain what was going on.
"I can't ping you. Is something unplugged?", said the tech.
"No, but the router is in another building and I have no way of transferring the call to that room. Call me on my cell phone."
What was supposed to be a relaxing morning of designing and decorating quickly became a relay between two buildings, two cell phones which were rapidly running low on their batteries, several calls made between myself, John, Verizon, and two of our colleagues who could not be on-campus, and countless text messages. We were dead in the water.
Frustrated, I ran back to my office to eat a pack of Smarties because, I'm not kidding, they really make me feel smarter. I went into the MDF room to look at the switches, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but the equivalent of an electrical epileptic seizure! I took the FiOS cable out of the switch, re-seeded it, and nothing. I took out the eight cables leading to the other switches and re-seeded them one by one. I put in the first one, and my lovely lights were glowing slowly. The second, same results. The third and fourth, same results. On the fifth one, the lights began to flash rapidly again. Ok, that narrows it down! I am getting so close to solving this, I can taste it! I took out all of the cables that were plugged into that switch. I plug them in one by one.
"AHA! I GOT YOU SUCKA! NUMBER 159 IS MY CULPRIT!TO THE MAP!"
Hurriedly, I went to my floorplans, and wouldn't you know it, number 159 was located in the computer lab. I ran up to the computer lab (good thing I'd had my coffee), followed the cable which led to a hub; followed each of the four cables that came out of that hub and one of them led right back into a jack on the same plate it came out of. I unplugged it from the wall.
"What did you do?? I can ping you now!" said the bewildered tech.
>>insert sigh of relief here<<
Moral of the story: Don't go to work on Saturday. (But could you imagine if I didn't and then showed up Monday morning and no one would've been able to get on? But eventually I'd figure it out and then everyone would think me a hero. Wait a second... Dangit.)