You plugged WHAT? WHERE?!

I’ve officially had the stupidest customer of the year, today.

This customer has had a ticket open with us for over 2 weeks. We kept seeing alarms coming from his smartjack — no signal from his equipment, etc. We kept testing it, and continually saw the same alarms, so we kept sending to him to verify his equipment. Each time, he would send it back to us, saying his equipment was running fine. This went on and on.

Tonight, I got this ticket (first time I was involved). I looped the smartjack inside his office, and could test to it fine. I turned that loop down, and then called the customer. I asked him to get into his router, so that he could test to a loop that I would put up on his smartjack.

He said, “Oh, I can’t do that. I don’t have my router configured or even turned on yet. The cable from the smartjack is plugged directly into my Windows NT server.”

[Doh!][3]

[3]: “In case you don’t understand: the cable from the smartjack looks just like a regular ethernet cable. However, it is NOT. There is absolutely no way in hell this would actually work. In fact, this set up should have destroyed his ethernet card. This is rudimentary knowledge for anyone worth their salt in the networking industry. I seriously wonder how this guy got his job.”