Smooth move

This IT shop needs a server moved from one site to another, and decides the easiest way to make the trip go smoothly is to hire an engineer from the server vendor to do it, says a pilot fish close to the project.

"Once the server was back up and on site, we discovered we had four times as much disk than we had started with," fish says. "Spoke to the engineer and proceeded to check the cabling. He had two cables -- one labeled A and one labeled B -- and two ports also labeled A and B. He got them the wrong way around.

"The only fix, as the server was now up, was to manually identify the rogue disks and segments and delete them, but ensuring we did not delete a live disk. We had 120 normal segments, which meant we were going to check 480 segments to tidy up the machine. Which was going to take approximately 14 hours extra.

"The engineer then said, 'As it's now a software issue, can I leave the site?'

"Being a little fed up at this extra 14 hours of unpaid overtime he had caused, my reply was, 'You will either leave the site instantly or I will bury you under the computer room floor with your server acting as a grave stone.'

"The next morning we had a phone call from the vendor asking if we had seen their engineer -- he had not turned up for work that day.

"He did turn up the following day, and we banned him from ever working on our site again."

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