Historically, one of the joys of the computer techie world is the comms room. For the unacquainted it is generally a room that only a select few have access to that is full of equipment with flashing lights on it. All of it is important yet it is a rare person that can go round all of it and describe everything each part is doing. That’s the magic of IT really, everyone does their bit and it all stiches together into a fully functional working tapestry.

I say historically as the move to the cloud has gradually reduced the need for these rooms for many companies, certainly at the scale they used to be. In this particular story the comms room in question was actually an entire floor of a quite large building in central Manchester. Not my home city by some distance but we all know travel is just part of the joys of being in IT. I am there to bring to life a new remote access system. Should be fairly simple with a few modem chassis to mount, some new circuits (ISDN 30s) ready for use to deliver the inbound calls, a bit of testing to do then a simple change of delivery number for an 0800 facility to switch traffic to this new live site. I mean what could go wrong?

As you may be learning, or already know, in the world of IT, everything can and will go wrong.

The first minor disaster is when the building IT lead comes to find me for a ‘chat’. We exchange pleasantries and he explains that he limps thanks to a juggling course he went on recently to ‘enhance his management skills’. In fairness, it was actually after the official course and he was juggling whilst standing on a chair on top of a bar later that evening. Legally, not a leg to stand on in terms of blaming the company. Still it was a highly noticeable and bad limp yet totally irrelevant to the rest of the story.

As he is about to disappear, he remembers why he came to find me. “Just thought I’d mention that the new circuits you have ordered have cut off all IT comms from the building. Someone has pinched the core circuits and given them to you. As a result there are some 500 or so people unable to work, so if you could sort that out please, that would be good.”. Well that’s a strange one. Why would someone do that? Why is it my problem? Arggh.

This all takes some serious sorting out. The telco engineer on site has an amazing knack of being able to disappear when needed and takes some serious finding. Eventually I locate him swearing that he was not actually hiding under the desk, just helping with a “fault”.

After some frank discussion and a lot of huffing, he agrees to go and revert all the damage and then try to provision my circuits another way. I think the building IT manager starting to issue threats of physical violence helped a little but regardless by about 5pm we have service restored just in time for everyone to go home. Another half hour later and I have my new circuit deliveries live and functional too. Phew. Now I can actually get on with the full commissioning and testing.

This takes some time. About 5 hours in total, so it is about 10pm when I finally swing live service over and breathe a sigh of relief. A quick pack up of my equipment and I’m ready to go, however the main comms room doors are locked. Odd, I was told this was a 24 hour building and the guard knew I was in here. Hmm. Now for the younger generation reading this, I need to explain that mobile phones did not exist yet. At least not to issue to techies. Pagers that wake you up at stupid o’clock, yes but mobiles, no.

Ok, so I’m locked in and I know the fire exit is fully alarmed. There’s also some of those lovely Halon warning signs dotted around. Déjà vu hits me. Oh no. It’s not, it’s just a memory. Time to hit the phone. But who do I phone? Again, I reiterate, mobile phones do not really exist, neither do on-line searches for some kind of helpdesk for people locked in your company comms rooms. Arggh.

After some pondering I phone the 24x7 service centre to explain the situation on the hope they can help me in some way or other. After a lot of messing about we find a 24x7 security number to call that deals with all security incidents across the company. Brilliant! Unfortunately when I phone them the situation does not improve. It turns out this building holds some interesting data assets and as such has an automated police response to incidents. The systems are not centrally controlled, so opening any door will set of an alarm, they cannot be disabled and I am effectively trapped. Clearly there would be a keyholder in this scenario, so I try that angle, ahh, yes there is but the details are not up to date and the person has left the company.

For those less familiar, sleeping in a comms room is not a joyful experience. It is cold, the air con tends to have a debilitating effect on your skin and it’s generally noisy. Oh, there is also no food and I am ravenous. Staying here till morning is not an option I wish to take!

Now I don’t know what you would have done in this position but I had just about exhausted my mind and body, all I wanted to do was go home with a kebab on the train (apologies to those that may have to put up with the smell) . My choice in the end was a simple one. Use the emergency exits through the building to escape and then hang around to explain to the police.

And that is exactly what happened. Police were pretty much pulling up as I was escaping and an hour or so later incident report forms were filled in, loads of lecturing given and generally a lot of pain. Eventually I did get my kebab but the train was a complete failure. Taxi back, long day out.