Worst Electrician EVER?

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thenightsiders@reddit

I built a cybersecurity program at a CT school this year and summer. Datacenter with lots of racks, software development lab with desktops, gaming PC area, laptop/lecture area, and more. So much CAT6.

Electricians, on the second day of school, cut all my main lines to the internet (we had a separate network from the school).

They also cut all the ethernet in my ceiling, too.

We still have no idea why they did it, but it gave the students lots of practice at wiring patch bays and keystones.

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ghostalker4742@reddit

So many questions from the datacenter side...

Who was responsible for the electrician coming to site, and who was supervising? Did nobody review the work with the electrician first? How did an electrician mix up low-voltage and high-voltage lines? Was the site manned, or were they left to work unattended?

Good lesson for students to make physical crimps... but a total failure in DC management, and a great example of why change control is needed.

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thenightsiders@reddit

I met with the electrician, and I also confirmed the plans with him. I ran the PO, but in education admin, not me, selects the bids and so on. Also, I verified our wiring was up to code. I know the fire chief and confirmed.

I was not able to man the site (they sent me to teach the CyberSec lab elsewhere) and was assured my boss and the facilities and grounds crew would keep an eye on things during the work.

So...yeah, totally agree about the failure in management and change control.

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thenightsiders@reddit

I met with the electrician, and I also confirmed the plans with him. I ran the PO, but in education admin, not me, selects the bids and so on. Also, I verified our wiring was up to code. I know the fire chief and confirmed.

I was not able to man the site (they sent me to teach the CyberSec lab elsewhere) and was assured my boss and the facilities and grounds crew would keep an eye on things during the work.

So...yeah, totally agree about the failure in management and change control.

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schnurble@reddit

Why did the electricians not replace it? I would've required them to replace it all.

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Affectionate_Ad_3722@reddit

Sparkies are terrible at low voltage. Every time I've seen a really fucked network install, it was done by electricians.

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FlowerRight@reddit

But its all the same wire right? /s

Honestly that train of thought is why they get involved with fiber and CAT wiring

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schnurble@reddit

I mean that's completely valid. I wasn't entirely clear, I meant I would've required the electricians to have it replaced at their expense, not necessarily do it themselves. I totally get that they are frequently crap at LV work.

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WraithYourFace@reddit

When I was in the electrical union (I was on the LV side), our instructor said he would never let electricians do low voltage. This guy was a Master Electrician as well (plus am RCDD). Basically said they don't care if it looks good and will destroy cable because they are used to stuff in conduit.

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_My_Angry_Account_@reddit

I would have gotten a quote to have the work done and then have them pay that amount while still having the students do it.

Make some money and use it as a teaching point.

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InevitableOk5017@reddit

Sounds like a union didn’t like non union work.

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NotPromKing@reddit

I’m pro-union, but any union that does that kind of shit immediately losses my support.

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Right_Ad_6032@reddit

This is precisely why I don't support unions.

I don't doubt there's good ones but nine times out of ten it's tribal bullshit.

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Maro1947@reddit

I'm a great fan of unions

Love my weekends, holiday and sick pay

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Jazzlike_Pride3099@reddit

Yep! 25 vacation days, 37 hour week, overtime pay, paid sick leave, unemployment insurance....

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pawwoll@reddit

How to tell you're from eu without telling you're from eu

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Jazzlike_Pride3099@reddit

Yep 😁🤣

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Maro1947@reddit

People who don't appreciate unions, even in an industry like IT have no sense of "us"

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rajrdajr@reddit

I'm a great fan of unions

Citizens should vote for leaders who will make worker protections universal (e.g. universal pension, healthcare, paid vacation, sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, 3etc…). Unfortunately, lying and gaslighting works on a large enough fraction of the voting population that unions are the best we can do today.

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starm4nn@reddit

Nope. Big government is what got us in this mess in the first place.

Unions are much more directly accountable.

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NotPromKing@reddit

I’ve worked with a number of unions. There are good ones and there are bad ones. Varies by trade and region. Typically comes from the leadership, and there’s often a lot of “three generations of family union bosses” - any time you see two or three lines of family members in leadership, you’re almost guaranteed to have a bad time.

I absolutely support the concept of unions and I’m disappointed every time I hear about unions tarnishing themselves with pettiness, tribalism, and outright corruption.

And I cringe every time I hear “brother” (and sister? Weirdly I can’t think of a time I’ve ever heard a female union member referred to as sister).

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InevitableOk5017@reddit

I am to but I’ve seen some bs that a few have done that I’m like, why did you do that?

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RIP_RIF_NEVER_FORGET@reddit

And sabotaging work is what gets union outfits banned as contractors.

I wish I could hire union low volt guys, but last time they cut half of our intercom system to shit.

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TheDarthSnarf@reddit

I mean their union company is going to be paying for the repairs - so I'm not sure how that helps them in the long run. Especially since we are going to invoice them for downtime as well.

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captainhamption@reddit

It's not about the cost, it's about sending a message.

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RichardJimmy48@reddit

The message they're sending is 'blacklist our entire union from doing work at any of your buildings and only hire non-union from now on'

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jockmcfarty@reddit

We had a backup data centre with PCs, phones etc. wired into patch panels in specialised floor tiles. We came in for a test one day and nothing in one part of the room worked. Network guys traced the cables and found that they'd all been cut ¼" below the floor.

The electricians had been doing maintenance work and needed to lift the floor tiles. "What should we do with these cables?" "Oh, just remove them." So they did.

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Zaphod1620@reddit

It's been a long time since I was deploying build outs, but I always found electricians HATED low voltage/network installers. I had a few instances of what OP described, but it ended up with the electrical contractors getting into deep shit and paying the network installers to re do it, at rush-job pay rates, out of their own pocket.

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StringLing40@reddit

Instead of just cutting stuff they should have stated what they were doing and why. There are building codes. Wires in ceilings can cause huge problems for the fire service if it’s not done right.

We had to review all of our procedures for wiring cables some time ago. It’s all done very differently now. We have to regularly wrap and pin cables in plastic trunking. So that fire crews don’t get tangled in wires in a building on fire. We have to use special fire pipes in any holes we drill so the fire doesn’t spread. Cables have to fixed to ceilings, not loose in the voids. So many rules.

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URPissingMeOff@reddit

If it was old stuff, I'm guessing fire code. Maybe the wire and tie wraps were not plenum-rated. Generally things have to be brought up to code when major renovations are taking place.

Or maybe it was a dick move

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alwayz@reddit

Ironic, they just taught a whole class how to do that work without them.

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OniNoDojo@reddit

Not electricians, but tech from the phone company (many years ago) who should have known better:

We spent 3 days running cat5 in a veterinary clinic that was based in a century home (thinks all plaster walls, etc) and it was a horrendous job but through some creative conduit and drilling we got it all pulled and relatively tidy. We had requested the phone company be in at the same time so we could work in conjunction but they kept backing out of the time slots and we were coming up on the deadline for the clinic re-opening. 3 days after we finished and headed out, we get a call that none of the computers have internet or access to the server. Basic troubleshooting on the phone and we had to go onsite to go any further.

Phone company came, cut all our cat5 and used it to pull their RJ11 and wire the phone jacks. They were stunned when our lawyers were adamant that they come back and re-pull all of our cable as well. The rub was, we even left strings in the spots where there was conduit. If they just followed along where we ran our cables it would have been an easy job for them.

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Otto-Korrect@reddit (OP)

"We don't know what this is. Let's cut it!"

Sadly, I've seen that before

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Deifler@reddit

Not a high volt election, but we have a terrible low-volt "splice" a cat6 cable with wire nuts. It worked, at FE speeds, but still surprised. They also installed a security PoE camera to brick with doubled sided Velcro and kid you not, soldered the wired to the contacts on the cameras RJ-45 jack... It was a special days.

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devious_204@reddit

"this cat 5 unshielded cable for a digital surveillance camera should work perfectly fine if i lay it on top of a fluorescent light ballast, there should be 0 interference, oh look my cable tester that just measures continuity says its perfectly fine"

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Otto-Korrect@reddit (OP)

It has some slack, so we'll just wrap it around the ballast several times.

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rednehb@reddit

If you wrap it clockwise the ballast actually makes the transfer go faster due to the magnetic field. It also picks up various radio signals which is basically a free soundtrack for the people in that office.

/r/ShittySysadmin

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scienceproject3@reddit

These days it would. It takes a lot to mess with modern ethernet. We regularly ran cables in cable treys with 3 phase 600 volt teck lines with zero issues.

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Ok-Condition6866@reddit

Electricians don't clean up after themselves. You mention cleaning and they bolt.

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Stryker1-1@reddit

Back when I did low voltage we were doing a new build out and the general contractor was on my ass about me and my guys never taking the time to bring any of the garbage bins out to the dumpster.

We were charing in around ~$100/hour per person.

The GC calls me in with the customer and starts going off about how we won't help empty garbage bins.

The customer was pissed and went off on the GC about how he should leave us alone and what they were paying to have us there and how he should find someone else to empty the bins.

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Stryker1-1@reddit

Once had a customer who every summer would be taken off the power grid to do some maintenance.

Usually they would pay us to be on site to ensure everything went to batter backup and was picked up by a generator that was brought in.

One year they decided they didn't need us. No problem. We get the alert the site is on battery backup and everything is good.

About 20 minutes goes by and we start seeing devices power down. We get a pissed off call and come on sight.

Turns out the electrician plugged the ups into the generator but never started the generator.

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architectofinsanity@reddit

I witnessed an electrician and his apprentice punch down over seven hundred ports in a network closet.

Part of the job was to validate all of them - and boy howdy am I glad we did.

The apprentice was color blind and just yolo’d the wiring.

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RichardJimmy48@reddit

I have never had an electrician/data installer terminate CAT cabling and not have to call them back out to redo it. At this point, I just have them run the wires where they need to go and we take care of punching them down in-house. Apparently when your entire job that you do all day every day is terminating data cabling, the idea of buying a $2,500 Fluke and actually testing your work is just out of the question.

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architectofinsanity@reddit

True, I’m starting to see that more and more. Back then I worked for a college and this was a typical job we bid out when classrooms or buildings were remodeled. Always had good experiences with our local contractors until that job. They owned it and fixed it. Could have done without the ding in our deployment schedule but shit happens.

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zorinlynx@reddit

I have to wonder, how big is the building?

In a lot of larger buildings, lighting is on 277 volt circuits, because that's what you get between phase and ground on a 480V three-phase supply, which larger buildings use for their main power distribution.

If they wired that to electrical outlets, things could get spicy very quick if you plug something in that doesn't have an autoswitching power supply...

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RichardJimmy48@reddit

277/480 uses completely different colored wires compared to 120/208. They'd open up the junction box and see gray, brown, orange, and yellow instead of white, black, red and blue and know right away that they were dealing with 277/480.

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HowDidFoodGetInHere@reddit

Considering that quite a lot of commercial lighting is 208V, this could've ended much worse.

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RichardJimmy48@reddit

Electrical codes make that virtually impossible for a competent electrician to do on accident. In the US neutral is always white and phase is always black/red/blue on a 120/208 system. The electrician would have to hook up a non-white wire to the silver screw on the outlet, which is an immediate no-no. Likewise, if the lighting circuit was 277v the colors are totally different. Neutral is gray and phase is brown/orange/yellow. If you see those colors when you're getting ready to wire a 120v outlet that's also going to be a 'stop and figure out it' scenario as well.

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Loan-Pickle@reddit

208 would have probably been fine as most computer gear is auto switching these days. Now if they had tapped into a 277 circuit…

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HowDidFoodGetInHere@reddit

I know some electronics have manual voltage selector switching, but I've never seen a PC/monitor that auto switched voltages. I may be wrong, I'm just saying I haven't seen it.

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frymaster@reddit

back in the '90s, computer power supplies had little switches on them to switch between 110/240. The reason they don't any more is because they are auto-switching

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agoia@reddit

I took an A+ class at a trade school and flicking that switch to 220 was something I always did in the break/fix lab classes where you'd disable a computer and then someone else had to fix it.

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MDL1983@reddit

Snap crackle and pop!

A customer bought a PC - Lenovo - and I didn’t notice the switch on it, nor did I notice that, out of the box, it was on 110 until I plugged it in. Waste of a site visit that day.

Someone I know flicked that switch live on a brand new silicon graphics work station, cost between 3-4 grand in the late 90s

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RiteRevdRevenant@reddit

I reckon doing the same thing might've had some spectacular results if it was done somehere that 220 was the norm.

Yup.

I used to work in a high school where we had to hot-glue every single one of those switches in place after we lost an entire computer lab to this. Let all the magic smoke out.

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shikkonin@reddit

I've never seen a PC/monitor that auto switched voltages

Was the last time you saw a PC or monitor 20 years ago? They all have wide range input now.

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SherSlick@reddit

Out of the electronics in my house there are only a few that take 110v only: My OLED TV and surround receiver.

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dhanson865@reddit

I just checked the monitor I'm reading your message on and it says

100-240 Vac, 50/60 Hz

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jbennett8000@reddit

Look at the label on yours

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boli99@reddit

did you not have an intern you could get to stand in the middle of the room waving their arms around?

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UltraEngine60@reddit

MSPs in a nutshell. Why fix it?

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ugus@reddit

lol

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Burning_Ranger@reddit

Many years ago, turning off the light switch for the server room also turned off power to all the servers.

Ah, so that's what that bit of duct tape was covering the light switch.

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eggbean@reddit

In UK housing the lighting circuit would have much lower amperage than the socket circuit, like 6A vs 32A. I can't remember business/commercial, but I would expect it to be different. That guy doesn't sound like he's professionally qualified.

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nostalia-nse7@reddit

Isn’t the UK 220V? 32A, really?!? Yikes! North America a typical circuit is 120V@15A or 20A (I’d suspect a new commercial circuit may be 20A).

Even 6A@220 would still be 1300W. Most office PCs would be about 35w typical usage. Add a pair of monitors, and as long as you aren’t powering 2 large laser printers that fire up at the same time, you’re fine.

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Xaphios@reddit

Prefacing this with the statement that I totally agree the work here was rubbish and the contractor probably shouldn't be doing electrical work. I just wanna chip in on the power draw bit.

I'm in the UK - had a similar thing (lower power, not weird switching) in offices I worked at, but it was deliberate - there was only one spare connection in the electrical panel and it was for a lower power draw circuit. The new circuit going in was for a few new desks, we calculated the draw and the sparkies forbade those users from having any kind of heater. Anything else was fine. We were using thin clients at 12v 3 or 4A, and dual monitors at around 100W each per desk though. The printer probably used more power than the IT kit at the other 15 desks combined!

Most full fat PCs use a 5A fuse, and they generally draw a lot less than that (business machines would have to be mega chunky to break 500 watts, so about 2A) so the power draw of that desk would likely have been well within a lighting circuit's safety limit.

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eggbean@reddit

Sure, but it's not a setup that would keep running for very long as soon as the cleaner plugs in the Henry.

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eggbean@reddit

Sure, but it's not a scenario that would last very long as soon as the cleaner plugs in the vacuum.

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uzlonewolf@reddit

In the US, "to code" only means it won't kill someone, it does not mean it will work.

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malikto44@reddit

We have a code in the US?

/s

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dustojnikhummer@reddit

Czech here, I also got 6A on light circuits.

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LemonHerb@reddit

Once we had an electrician run a line down through the ceiling from outside. It rained really hard the next day and he didn't seal the hole properly.

Water poured directly down in the $300k driving simulator we just installed

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itguy9013@reddit

We recently did a renovation in one of our sites. Probably 100-150 new CAT6 runs in total.

The contractor labelled none.of.them.

My colleagues went in to patch and setup up desks and had no idea where anything was.

There will be words with the contractor before we sign off.

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Otto-Korrect@reddit (OP)

How is that even possible?

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Status_Service9000@reddit

It wasn't in the work order.

When the client wants it cheap then you gotta cut corners somewhere.

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itguy9013@reddit

I don't know. I wasn't involved very closely in the project. All I know is my colleague who is involved was furious when he went in and found nothing labelled.

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trimalchio-worktime@reddit

idk, if you're running a datacenter it's kinda up to you to monitor what an electrician is doing. if it's not in the datacenter then this is basically what you should expect when you don't watch them... maybe next time send a PFY to make sure they don't do anything terribly stupid. This probably applies to everyone including IT vendors lol.

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Bogus1989@reddit

god dont even get me started. no one can figure out what thermostat actually controls the air in our suite at work. Ive heard a different story from each person. I just gave up moved offices, at one point it was 55 degrees in my office in winter....and trust me.....im not the guy who ever complains about shit(spent 8 years in the army answering to uncle sams "war on terror", i generally enjoy the cold. At a point my hands were too cold to be efficient typing.

sorry, i know a little off topic and from afar an hvac problem, but at the end of the day, those guys work in same department.

LOL put it this way, we hire a 3rd party to do any real serious work.

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Kiernian@reddit

With a $20,000/mo electric bill for this office building, we just need to be more energy conscious. These are tough economic times! How else are we going to afford mid-week motivational outings for the sales team? And if she's not moving, is she REALLY using her computer? /s

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trev2234@reddit

Had a works guy cut through the cabling for our projector, which ran through the ceiling. My colleague had rather large breasts and he was busy staring at them, rather than what he should be looking at.

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SperatiParati@reddit

We needed some extra circuits for racks in a small data centre. In the UK pretty much everything except domestic is on 400V/230V three phase, with it being down to the electrical designers to balance single phase loads.

Our PDUs were single phase, but the electricians had put three phase sockets in, so we raised a work order to get them changed. My boss, specified them as "blue" sockets (IEC60309 colour for 230V) rather than "red" sockets (the colour for 400V) and it should have been a simple task.

Unfortunately, the electricians were also still working in their heads with the pre-2004 cable colours (red/yellow/blue for phases + black for neutral) and mistook his request for the entire set of data centre sockets for the racks to be on L3, the old "blue" phase.

We had door controller on L1, lights on L2 and all of the HPC cluster on L3...

The UPS suffered an "explosive failure" when we tried powering back up, which I also realise now means their circuit breakers were either missing, or inappropriately specced, as we should have had them trip out before the UPS went bang!

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bz386@reddit

During a house remodel, we added outdoor lights that were on a light sensor. The lights were supposed to come on automatically if it got dark outside. There was still a light switch on the inside to completely kill power to the lights in case we didn’t want them on at all.

On the first night in the remodeled house, the light outside our bedroom stayed on even if I killed the power using the indoor switch.

I called the electrician and told him he wired the light incorrectly to the hot wire instead of the switched wire. He kept insisting that the issue is with the light and that the light sensor is broken.

How on earth would a broken light sensor provide power to a light that is not supposed to have any power because the switch is off? We argued for 15 minutes and he eventually came out and fixed the mis-wiring.

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zeus204013@reddit

You don't have to be too smart to do some simple electrical jobs...

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Windows_XP2@reddit

Electrical stuff is scary though

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Cosmonaut_K@reddit

- Electrical is easy / Electrical is scary \ Electrical is easy +

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Letterhead_North@reddit

AC

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ibbetsion@reddit

Ha ha, this gave me a quite a chuckle!

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zalurker@reddit

We once had an electrician come in to do a quote for some work in the server room. He took the cover off a DB board to look at the wiring and dropped it while putting it back. Tripped every switch on the board.

The IT Ops manager chased him out of the building. It took the rest of the day to get everything back up again. Ironically the quote was for a upgrade to the battery backups as part of our DR planning.

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llyenn@reddit

We had that happen in a conference room. The whole system kept shutting down, but whenever the technicians showed up, everything was fine. Took a week to figure out that it was powered by the switched leg on the motion sensor.

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rednehb@reddit

In a similar vein, I was a car mechanic helper in high school and one of our best customers brought in her car because the clutch was burnt out. Replaced the clutch and she came back two days later with a burnt out clutch. We did EVERYTHING but kept smelling it burning on test drives.

One day it was up on the lift and I happened to notice that the arm on the clutch pedal itself was cracked and bent about an inch, so it wasn't properly engaging. $5 part ended up costing us hundreds.

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agoia@reddit

A lesson in looking for why something failed in addition to replacing the failed thing.

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rednehb@reddit

I agree, but it was more like a lesson in following the path of failure through to the initial input, when it comes to sysadmin stuff.

Akin to someone getting a new laptop and accidentally hitting caps lock or holding shift on their touchpad without realizing it, because the buttons/commands are different.

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rednehb@reddit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AynXoLjYrKc

sometimes this guy is super valuable

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Anlarb@reddit

Pretty minor error, they did exactly what they were told to do. The guy who asked for it had no way of knowing either. Whatever logic put it in place probably made sense in a different office layout years ago.

Nothing broken, no ones dead? Great day for the electrician.

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tgwill@reddit

Had an electrician wire up our 3 phase UPS to single phase for a rather large datacenter supporting O&G GIS systems.

At least the UPS failed before the servers and storage did

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atw527@reddit

I have plugs out in a large space that is meant for lighting; users plug their equipment into it all the time. So when bulbs are being changed, their equipment goes down. True story.

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ShoulderIllustrious@reddit

Without giving you too much detail. We just hit something similar in a critical setting. There's circuitry for specific buttons that basically sound the alarm for folks dying and that help is required. These run on embedded devices...the electrician that came to the site to change a button, flashed the wrong thing and disabled the whole system and didn't test anything after to see if it worked.

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flapanther33781@reddit

so now they're probably empowered to report stupid shit

When I was working my way through college at a Fortune 500 company I used to submit suggestions to the suggestion box email any time I thought of one. One year I made a suggestion that I thought would only improve the workflow of the 750 people that did my job across 3 call centers. It turned out my suggestion improved the workflow of about 40,000 people.

I was awarded a $750 prize directly from the CEO - one of only 5 given out each year - specifically because they wanted everyone else to see that even though most of the suggestions we make go nowhere, that once in a blue moon you make a suggestion that has way bigger implications than anyone might have expected.

This person possibly just saved lives and you're complaining? You've got exactly the wrong attitude.

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ShoulderIllustrious@reddit

It's a regular person that I deal with more often than not. They never follow the ticketing guidelines, always reach out directly and have wildly crazy suggestions on what the problem is. Never provide accurate information either, and don't ask questions when they get confused. It's really luck that he had another one of those episodes and pointed at the wrong system which prompted us to wonder if something else is going on elsewhere nearby and we found it.

No one logged any of the work, it was done locally but there was no official change documentation.

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flapanther33781@reddit

It's really luck that

It was luck that my suggestion improved the workflow of 40k people.

Help is help.

If you have the right attitude.

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mortsdeer@reddit

A case of a stopped clock is right, twice a day.

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ShoulderIllustrious@reddit

Yep! This dude usually likes to skip the line and not follow proper escalation. This time he pointed nearby the actual problem and we just happened to see it. Have a feeling I'll be fielding more calls from him in the near future after this.

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BobRepairSvc1945@reddit

A large local government body had this happen at their brand new 3 story office building recently. Almost all the outlets in every office, open office area, and workrooms were all connected to the motion sensors for the room lights.

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dartdoug@reddit

We moved moved a small town into a brand new municipal building and ran into the same thing. Soon after our guys finished installing the PCs we started getting calls about mysterious PC restarts; this was by design. Half the outlets were wired to the motion sensors. Not one of those outlets is being used. A total waste of $$$.

I asked the construction project manager what kind of device would typically be connected to an outlet controlled by a motion sensor. He shrugged his shoulders and said that's what the architect specified.

Meanwhile, this same building (which cost almost $ 30 million) had 3 floods during its first year of operation. Now, less than 4 years after the building opened, the police department has to move out of their headquarters in the lower level because the sewer line was pitched incorrectly and sewage was backing up into the basement.

Early next year they will embark on a 6+ month project to run a new line going to a sidestreet. We have to move the PD to another part of the building until the work is complete.

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sonic10158@reddit

The factory I work at has all of their machines, the office area, and the server room all on a single circuit 🙃

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Otto-Korrect@reddit (OP)

This building is a Frankenstein's monster of cobbed together wiring. I really doubt he checked to see how much load was already on the circuit he patched into.

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thehightechredneck77@reddit

Here I am wondering why you've got to switched outlet in a commercial setting. But after reading this post, I'm reminded of the small small business I used to work in that was a converted home. There should almost never be switched outlet in a commercial environment. That's stupid s*** left over from someone who built a room that was too cheap to put a light fixture in the ceiling so had one part of an outlet switched. The electrician should have checked for that, but maybe he thought it would have been stupid to have one there in the first place so didn't. I wouldn't say he's the dumbest electrician ever only that he made assumptions about something that truly was out of place. I hate Frankenstein homes. You never know what the previous guy was thinking.

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VviFMCgY@reddit

I thought this said worst ELECTION ever

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Otto-Korrect@reddit (OP)

That too.

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rustafur@reddit

You are about to be surprised at how common this is. I've got a similar story, myself.

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keoltis@reddit

I never encountered a good one at my previous job.

Patched a new building with only 4 pairs on each wire because 'noone uses 8 anyway" found out when none of the poe equipment would work but i could get signal from them.

Another was so lazy with a remodel that each workstation was patched and numbered randomly rather than 1,2,3,4 ports that linked back to the comms panel 1,2,3,4. Instead it would be completely random numbers like 27, 45, 9, 12.

Had one bend ethernet cables at right angles inside a wall hard enough to cause all about half to break.

Just a few examples of 3 different electrical contractors I was forced to use.

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Otto-Korrect@reddit (OP)

I feel your pain.

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Divochironpur@reddit

Please don’t spare the details: how did you figure out what caused the issue? I haven’t laughed at something in a while and this story is the perfect nightcap.

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drags@reddit

This could actually just be a building code issue and/or a misunderstanding? Back in 2017 in San Fran we were building out a new office, and we had to have at least half of the outlets at every desk be switched by motion sensors for "eco regulatory reasons". It was such a wut-face moment, but I'm pretty sure we escalated it all the way to the corp lawyers who said "yeah, it's legit". So some desks just got twice as many outlets and the motion sensor ones were all labelled as such.

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zeus204013@reddit

Not electrical (110/220) but low power...

In High School some dude wired wrong some circuit and burned potentiometers. I was afraid of doing something like that. Maybe his "sausage" fingers was the culprits... (actually the dude joked about being a medical doctor, gynecologist precisely)

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erikkll@reddit

Haha. That’s pretty hilarious. Don’t US light switches have different color wiring? (Guessing you’re from the us)

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grouchy-woodcock@reddit

They recently changed the color of Romex for different gauge wires and how many there are inside.

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uzlonewolf@reddit

That type of cable is only allowed in wood-framed buildings. If your building is steel or concrete then it's conduit (or armored cable, which is not colored) all the way.

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pfak@reddit

No.

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7f00dbbe@reddit

I'm dying picturing that in my head...

They might also get a chuckle out of that over on /r/electricians

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No-Term-1979@reddit

They would and someone would get their panties in a wad about both sides of the CAT6 getting cut

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noodlesdefyyou@reddit

i did ISP support for a brief stint, and during one of my calls i had found that the neighborhoods box was wired in to the city street lights.

same thing, lights came on around dark, sudden influx of calls about an outage.

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photo_master13@reddit

LEGEND!

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RBeck@reddit

Had a few dedicated circuits in the server room in our new office. Move in, and one night the first week in get a notification a few went offline. Next morning we find the circuit is dead, call the building manager and they come up to reset the breaker.

Everything is fine for a few more days, til it happens again around the same time. They reset the breaker and tell us maybe it's faulty?

Finally the third time it happens, I get the idea to watch security cameras, maybe my colleague is trying to setup his mining rig at night and didn't cut me in?

I watch as the cleaning crew plugs in a vacuum to the outlet just outside the server room, that was not supposed to be connected to our dedicated circuit.

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Took a while to notice a pattern.