When work-arounds go bad.

Good afternoon InLinkers,

Here is another story of IT wonder, wizardry, woe and workarounds.

Once upon a time, there was a tech startup...

And as most tech startups have aspirations and delusions of grandeur, so did this one.

They obtained prestigious office space on one floor of a building in the heart of a bustling city. It was a great location. But the office had barely any network infrastructure. Not so good when your entire business and technical model is cloud-based. They soon grew too big for these offices and needed to expand to another floor... So they did. They now had two separate floors in the same building but no network between them. The landlord prevented them from running any network cables too...

What was the solution to this problem? Ethernet over power adapters of course. 4 of them. Using the main power line of the whole 6 storey building to transfer important, sensitive and complex data was a "workaround". Nice.

The solution worked just enough to prove ultra frustrating. It would often collapse and die. Bandwidth was a sought after and highly valuable commodity. No connectivity and no internet on the second floor would be a regular occurrence but would come back online just when troubleshooting seemed to be getting somewhere. The IT guy just couldn't figure it out. Often fobbing it off and running around fruitlessly rebooting the network dongles. The staff would just walk out and go for a really long lunch or coffee (pub) break. The company was growing exponentially and would be moving to a newer better office soon anyway so the situation was just left to languish whilst work gravitated towards the newer, shinier, more awesome office.

The day before the office move took place the IT guy finally managed to figure out what was causing the outages. Why all the network drops would happen, what was causing them and when they would happen. Unfortunately, there would have been nothing he could have done to prevent anything. This is because the power link would drop off whenever someone in the flats above would turn on a vacuum cleaner. This is what had caused the 000's of man hours down and unable to work. Total loss to the company would have ranged in excess of hundreds of thousands of pounds in wasted time and salaries.

The moral of the story: Don't run your multi-million-pound tech startup through a ￡9.99 adapter from Maplins.