A ticket comes in from the regional sales director. Priority: Critical. Subject line: "Entire office cannot work. Internet completely dead. Client presentation in 2 hours."

I check the monitoring dashboard. Everything looks fine on our end. No outages, no alerts, all access points reporting healthy.

I call him.

Me: "Hey, I'm looking at the network and everything on our side looks normal. Can you tell me what you're seeing?"

Him: "Nothing. Complete blackout. Nobody can connect to anything. This has never happened before and I need this fixed immediately."

Me: "Okay. Is the router showing any lights?"

Him: "What router?"

Me: "The networking device in your office. Usually a black box with some blinking lights on it."

Him: "I dont see anything like that."

Me: "It should be somewhere near the main desk or the server closet. Sometimes people put things on top of it."

Long pause. Some shuffling sounds.

Him: "Oh. There is a box here but someone put the office plant on top of it and I had to move the plant."

Me: "Is it plugged in?"

Very long pause.

Him: "It was not plugged in."

Me: "Okay. Can you plug it in for me?"

Him: "It's plugged in now."

Me: "Give it about two minutes to come back up."

Exactly ninety seconds later he calls back to tell me the internet is working and that it must have been a brief outage on my end that I should look into.

I updated the ticket as resolved. Root cause: unplugged router. I left the plant out of the documentation.

The client presentation apparently went great.