In a former life I was a field technician that worked for a telecom company that dealt with many retail stores.

One time I had to replace a failing voicemail system in a shoe store and when directed to their LAN closet I was cautioned not to open the door fully. Apparently the pile of cables which were laying on the floor in a heap were not all spare, disconnected or disused. Something existed among the mass which was critical to their store’s network.

Any time the door was opened wide enough to comfortably access the room, their network would go down. So anytime someone had to enter, they would open the door partially and squeeze through sucking in their gut and holding their breath.

That wasn’t going to work for me as I had to remove and replace a rather large Nortel beige box. So, I started an excavation though the pile of cables and cords to clear a path for the door to swing open.

What I found to be the cause of their grief, was a power bar. The power bar had a breaker reset switch on the side, which when depressed, would kill the power to the rack itself. It also had a rocker power switch on the top, but that was just a different time bomb waiting to happen.

Open the door wide enough, the pile of crap would push against the breaker switch and kill their rack. As soon as you let the door close enough, the breaker would reset and allow things to boot back up again.

They were happy to get their voicemail back and even found out they had grey floor tiles in their LAN closet.