Dealing with incompetence (or Tales From an MSP)
At one of my old clients, I kept getting called out to troubleshoot an intermittent network connection. This location generated their own electricity for the facility, and they would back-feed their excess power onto the grid for which the local utility would compensate them.
C/S: "Readings from meter intermittent. Can't reliably remotely connect to meter."
Those are low-voltage signaling wire splicers known as Scotchloks, and are typically used for applications like burglar alarm connections. They are flaky-at-best and have no business being used in IT, and especially not for maintaining signal integrity in a high-speed digital communications network.
That was only part of the problem, though... Ready for the kicker? We had a fancy Fluke cable qualification tester that I ran again after the repair. It basically laughed at me.
I told them to replace the run with fiber or point-to-point.
They told me, "Well, it worked before!"
I told them, "Well, it doesn't work now."
They dug a trench and ran fiber out to the meter.
Posted Sep 3, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC