I don’t work in the IT department at my day job, but yet I do work in the company’s largest national branch in an unrelated field. We do not have any on-site IT staff – the closest we have is Totowa, NJ. Easily doable in 90 minutes, but if something goes wrong, most likely it won’t be resolved quickly.
It’s funny too, because our business is healthcare. If our computers are down, it’s really hard to dispense medication and ship product to patients.
In the last month or so, the IT department has changed. Actually, they used to call them self the “MIS Department”, but they later changed that to the more cool-sounding “IT Department”, or “Information Technology”. Part of the whole new IT department is upgrading the per-branch circuit capacity of their Internet connection. Instead of most branches having fractionated T-1’s, each branch is given a T-1 for data and another T-1 for voice.
I’m the guy in the branch that knows the most about computers, so everyone comes to me for help. I help when I can, but for the really big shit, I pull the reins in a bit, and say “whoa, someone has to come out here to do this.”
This was the case this week. Dave, an IT Engineering Field Tech from our Totowa branch e-mailed me and asked me to work with him today to remove a WIC card from our router, replace it with a new WIC card, and run a cat5 cable through the dropped ceilings to the new Verizon-supplied T1’s. (For those non-technical people, the hardest part would be running the wire up the wall, through the dropped ceiling and into the router. Removing the WIC card from the router (about the size of a credit card) only involves unscrewing it at two points, sliding it out, sliding another one in, and rescrewing the card back in. If you’ve ever added a PCI card to your computer to expand the capability of it, doing what I was asked to do today was 100x easier.)
At first I said sure, no problem. Then, I thought about it. I’m not in IT, but they want me to take down the whole router, run cat5 cable, and basically be responsible for the state of the Internet connection during the work.
I thought about this for an hour or so, e-mail Dave back and said “Hey man, I’m not trying to be a dick. But this is a biggie you’re asking me to do. I mean, potentially the system may not come back up, and I don’t know the first thing about Cisco routers. I’m going to have to get it in writing from someone at IT (Kal, April, whoever) that they’re OK’ing me to do this, and I’m not responsible for broken equipment or extended T1 downtime.”
Dave e-mails me back…”Are you kidding around or are you serious? I’m just trying to save myself from coming out there…besides, the ISDN should come back up when the T1 goes down…”.
My reply: “Well, people are getting tossed out of this branch for much less then taking the T1 down. I’m really going to have to insist that you come out here for this. I’ll help you as much as I can, but you’ll be driving the bus. And as far as the ISDN, I don’t have too much faith in that. In theory, the ISDN is supposed to come up as the T1 goes down…”
Of course Dave couldn’t get that in writing for me, so instead of me saving him a trip to Long Island from NJ, he had to come out here today. And a good thing he did too, because the upgrade failed. Almost two hours of downtime today because the IT Enginneer in Chicago who gave him the new code for the new WIC card for the Cisco router gave him the wrong code. It was for the wrong WIC card. So the old WIC card didn’t work and the new WIC card wouldn’t work.
When I asked Dave “Are you ok?” as I see beads of sweat dripping off his face in the 85 degree server room, he says “I’m in a world of shit.”
Oh, and the ISDN did not come up. 🙂
He finally called a senior network engineer (Kal), who, mind you had a day off today, and after hooking up the router to accept incoming connections via remote dialup, was able to get new code to the new WIC card so the router now worked with our new T1.
If Dave hadn’t come today and I did the work, not only would the connection still be down, but the router wasn’t properly hooked up to the remote dial-in component, making remote help impossible. We would have been stuck, and I most likely would have been fired.
Sorry to bore everyone here with my trivial nonsense, but the moral of this story is that always go with your gut instincts regarding a decision. If you think something isn’t right with a situation, you’re probably right. In order to get to the correct situation, you may have to inconvienence and/or piss someone off.
In this case, Dave had to take 1/2 a day to drive to Long Island and back, but heck, it all worked out in the end.