If there’s a road I have spent a lot of time on in my life, it’s the M1. On this particular journey we are in convoy heading to London with people and equipment to initiate and complete a major LAN migration over a few hours from old hubs to new switches, re-cabling as we go.

We have hotels booked, commissioning teams ready, cabling teams ready and an appetite to just get it done and get out for a beer after. Happy days! Arrival on site is 15:00 with service interruptions commencing at 19:00. In theory we’ll be a couple of hours, we are a well-rehearsed team that know each other well with a good plan.

The building itself is about 12 stories high with a main comms room feeding off to a comms room on each alternate floor via fibre, so the first job is to get all the kit mounted, powered up and fibre interconnects in place. Everything is preconfigured so when the first activity is done, that then just leaves patching and any cabling. That means that later, the main job is simply to move some cables around. It’s a little more complex than that but that’s the basic idea.

The client in question is a law firm, dealing in large corporate lawyer type stuff. Mergers, acquisitions, all that sort of thing. That means that there are nice meeting rooms, lots of people with dedicated offices, fridges full of champagne, all very posh. In fact to this day I still have one of their company branded pens I 'borrowed' and it still works. I guess that’s a sign of true quality!

All goes pretty well up till about 18:00 when we start doing the rounds to evacuate any late workers, or at least inform them of the interruptions that will occur across the evening. That is when the problem starts. Lawyer person says to me “You can’t do that, I am working”. We all know in the world of IT that we work in agreed change windows and this work is indeed agreed at board level, so we take the usual tactic, explaining this. It doesn’t wash, we just get a load of very polite and firm verbal back and I can sense this is not going to go well.

To cut a long story a bit shorter, we eventually agree to stand down, taking his details and of course, go for an obligatory beer.

The next morning we go in for a review meeting and explain what happened, client is remarkably OK with things, tells us we did the right thing and asks us to reschedule for the following week. We say yes, advise on cancellation charges which amount to around £2.5k and all is fine.

The next week we are again in convoy heading down to London. Around about Watford we get the call in – job cancelled, reschedule the following week. More cancellation charges. The following week the same happens. Each time we are too late to cancel hotels, most of the way into London anyhow so have a night over and a generally good time.

Eventually we do get in there, do the job with virtually no outage and come back home happy at last.