Who, me? Techie with three months' experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up

Martin, a newly hired network engineer at a small IT infrastructure company, found himself labeled as the "Cisco expert" due to his familiarity with Cisco gear. This title led the company to send him to a customer with an Nortel network, where he was tasked with installing a new switch for their Cisco-based network. Martin arrived at the customer's office to find a welcoming IT team and some friendly conversation about VLANs.

Once the pleasantries were out of the way, Martin got to work, completing the rack and stack, basic configurations, and setting up the VLANs discussed during his coffee break. After packing up, the IT team called Martin, expressing concern that over 4,000 AS/400 sessions had dropped since his work. Martin felt a disturbance in the force and soon discovered that the switch he had connected was the cause of the issue.

Upon further investigation, he found that the spanning-tree settings on the new switch were to blame. The AS/400 systems relied on SNA over TCP/IP emulation, and any packet loss would result in a complete system failure. Martin expressed deep embarrassment, acknowledging that his managers had been at fault for assigning him to work unattended on such a large customer. He learned valuable lessons from the experience and did not lose his job.