These days, Juan is a consultant for Evil Empire products, but once upon a time he started out at the helpdesk of a government service in a small European country. In his office, a 10 floor building that was the pinnacle of architecture, had it been build in Kazakhstan in the 70s, there was a wiring closet on every floor except on the top one where their department resided. The wiring box on the 9th floor was responsible for both the 9th and the 10th, resulting in reasonably impressive patching with about 200 cables. It looked like a mess - a mess, this young IT professional was about to clean up. But not alone.
"John, why hasn't anyone taken care yet of the hodgepodge of CAT cables on the 9th? A cat wouldn't find her kittens back there."
John was small and round, moustached man in his 40s who still lived with his mother. He seldom spoke and, thinking of it, also seldom did anything else either. Still, he was in the office since the 80s, in a time that working for the government guaranteed a tenure. Like so many others, he had become a part of the furniture. Just like an old cupboard, he would stand (well, "sit" - or, occasionally, "lie") somewhere in a corner until someone asked whether he could do something, as long as it's not too complex.
"I know you're very busy and stuff, but come and help me. We'll turn that box into patching paradise at 16:30, when most people on these floors are already home and can do with a network outage."
There wasn't much of a plan: Juan and John would remove all of the cables (error #1) and then, one by one, put them nicely back in again, using cable zip ties. Because everyone used dynamic IP addresses, it didn't matter much who got connected to what port (error #2). It's all TCP/IP anyway (error #3).
When the last cables where removed, Juan noticed accidentally that some cables had slightly different wiring. Although the connectors where RJ45, those cables only seemed to use 4 pins. A thought dawned on Juan. A horrible thought.
"John... Aren't these telephone cables? Isn't the wiring of our phones in the cellar?"
"Oh no. This closet is network and phone. My, it's 17:00 already. I've got to go. See you tomorrow!"
And John was off, leaving Juan in a, er, patchy situation until 2:00; to sort the network cables and the phone cables; to run around the whole office to check which connector connects to which patch panel in the wiring closet and subsequently who owns which phone number and to which port on the phone switch the patch panel needed to connect; and to repatch all network cables. After a short night in the office (until 6:00), Juan found out about the concept VLAN too. Some very unhappy people could no longer reach the mainframes that were very picky about who could access them from where.
It cost Juan a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but by 9:00 all was fine again. Bart, his boss, came in, unaware of what happened.
"Good morning Juan. Say, didn't you want to reorganize the wiring closet on the 9th? I saw it on my way and it still looks terrible. Juan? Juan? Did I say something wrong? Juan?"
True story, except for the names. Yeah, I tried a bit to write it in usual TDWTF style, but I'm not a native speaker so sorry if it isn't as good as the featured articles :)