Which might explain why no one touched it before

Pilot fish takes a job at a company that has recently parted ways with most of its existing IT staff.

"Shortly after my arrival, I was tasked with discovering the equipment and processes that were in place but poorly documented, if at all," says fish. "Any time something wasn't working, it was always a stressful reverse-engineering project."

He begins by reorganizing a poorly wired 19-inch open rack that contains several switches and routers. Fish has done this before without major mishap, so he's pretty sure he knows what to do first: figure out what goes where in this Cat-5 spaghetti bowl.

But 15 minutes after he starts rerouting wires and providing some wire management, one of his co-workers rushes into the data center. "What did you do?" co-worker howls. "The Internet is down!"

Fish steps back from the rack, finds a console, and checks the status of the Internet connection. It seems to be fine. He asks a networking colleague to confirm.

Moments later his BlackBerry Messenger goes off: "All good, NPF" -- no problem found.

Figuring all is well, fish returns to the wiring problem. But no sooner has he started but it happens again: "Internet is down!"

Huh? Fish steps away from the rack again. Internet seems to be back up.

He moves back to the rack, careful not to touch anything this time -- "Internet down!"

Apparently, just standing in front of the rack is killing the Internet.

"Further investigation revealed that a wire from a cable modem was crushed by a removable two-by-two-foot floor tile, stripping the insulation off it," fish says. "When I stepped on the tile, it grounded the power cord -- killing the Internet connection."

Stay connected with Sharky. Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a stylish Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

The Best of Shark Tank includes more than 70 tales of IT woe submitted by you, our readers, since 1999. Which all goes to prove, conclusively, that hapless users and idiotic bosses are indeed worldwide phenomena. Free registration is all that's needed to download The Best of Shark Tank (PDF).