Mouse mishap and more

In our previous networking blooper stories, we've shared with you many true tales of woe submitted to us by SearchNetworking.com members. We've made it our duty to try to teach you something while relaying the story. We have also received many bloopers from which we can't really spin a lesson -– but they are amusing and just might make you laugh. We've decided to combine a few of those silly bloopers here just for your enjoyment. Here they are:

This story was submitted by Greg Kelley:
When Kelley was working in a computer lab at a university, he had a student tell him that her mouse was broken. Kelley said, "Really?" As they were walking to the computer, she said, "Yeah, the buttons are on the bottom." Intrigued, Kelley stepped up to the computer, then rotated her mouse 180 degrees so that the buttons were at the top again. In her defense, she did catch on before he rotated the mouse.

This tale was submitted by Annette Boulia:
Five years ago, when she was a very junior network administrator, Boulia was asked to go out into the field to change the configuration on one of the company routers. Because of the delicacy of the matter, her boss wanted her to go to the site in case anything went wrong. As Boulia was changing the configuration, she made her last entry, "no ip," on the interface she was connected to. Well, we all know what that does. You got it -- she lost connectivity. Of course, Boulia panicked, while the customers all stood around wondering what

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was going on. Feeling very frustrated and nervous, Boulia had to call her boss and tell him what she had done. He laughed and asked her whether she had committed the changes. When she replied that she hadn't, he told her to reboot the router.

Here, Kevin Pruett shares his story:
About seven years ago, during Pruett's first AS/400 IPL (initial program load), he was following the process in the manual he had received from his AS/400 administrator's course when he suddenly realized, while looking at the blinking cursor, that he had ended all of the subsystems from a terminal emulation session. What this basically means is that he had terminated all means of administrative access to the AS/400. After about 25 harrowing minutes of wondering what in the world to do (and looking through the help wanted section), he decided to take a chance and unplug the UPS from the wall. The AS/400 was configured to perform an orderly shutdown in the event of a power failure, and he was hoping that it would still perform that function. Thankfully, it did, and all was well.

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Here is a full listing of all our true networking bloopers.


This was first published in November 2002

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