Who, me? Techie with three months' experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up

WHO, ME? “Where to begin?” is a marvelous question. To get you going at the start of the working week, The Register thinks the answer is a new instalment of “Who, Me?” the column that shares your admissions of error. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Martin” who told us about his very first job in tech. “I had just started working as a network engineer for a very small IT infrastructure company. Since I was the only person who worked with Cisco gear, that made me ‘The Cisco expert’,” he told The Register. That dubious status was enough for the company to send Martin to a customer who needed a new switch for a network that ran Nortel kit – not the Cisco boxes he kind-of knew. Martin told us he arrived to a warm welcome from the customer’s IT team, a decent coffee, and some friendly chat about adding VLANs. With those pleasantries accomplished, he got to work. “I completed rack and stack, basic default configuration, and the VLANs discussed over the coffee,” he wrote. Then he hooked everything up, tested the results, decided all was well, and prepared to leave. While he packed up, the phone rang. “I felt a disturbance in the force,” Martin wrote. “It was the customer’s IT team, asking me if I had done anything wrong, because over 4,000 AS/400 seasons had dropped.” “There was a clear cause and effect relation between the time I connected the switch and the sessions dropping,” Martin admitted. “And the only way to restore those sessions was for the IT team to kill them, manually, one by one.” Martin watched his client’s team as, over the next hour, they fixed the mess he made. “The post-mortem analysis revealed that the cause of the problem was the new switch – actually its spanning-tree settings. AS/400 at the time had its connections from the hosts to the mainframe through SNA over TCP/IP emulation, which, if you lost a single packet … you were screwed.” Martin told The Register that he felt deeply embarrassed by his error. “Those IT guys had been so nice to me and I had given them a really bad time,” he wrote. “But now, with the proper perspective after so many years, I see it was my managers who were to blame for calling me ‘The Expert' and for letting such a junior guy work unattended at such a big customer.” “Someone in the chain of command must have noticed and I did not lose my job,” he wrote. “But I learned some valuable lessons that day!” Have you assumed you knew everything there was to know about the tech you worked with, then found you didn’t? If so, click here to send us your story! ®

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