Besides contributing at @TheDailyWTF, I write DevDisasters for Visual Studio Magazine, and involved in various side projects including child rearing and marriage.

Recently, some new people transferred into Evi's group after being swallowed up as part of a intercompany shuffle. After everybody got nestled into their new pocket of the cubicle farm, the topic of bringing over their server hardware came up.

The department's server room was the obvious choice for where to put the equipment, because well, that's where everything else was already.

Though to the novice it would seem more like a server closet than a room, it had all the trappings befitting the smallish enterprise organization. It had independent air conditioning, a rack for mounting servers, environment monitoring, and also a key card lock to make sure that only certain need-to-have-access employees could enter the room.

The last part was intended to prevent a repeat of an incident the prior year committed by an allegedly "experienced" employee who, confused and bemuddled by the pretty blinking lights, power cycled the wrong server. However, management's past recollection of the previous year's event must have been faulty since when the new group requested access to the room to install their equipment, it was granted without even so much as an FYI notifying Evi - the person responsible for the hardware already in the room.

Evi was furious when he learned what happened. Being so late in the day, he'd have to pick up the topic in the morning. Unfortunately for Evi, morning turned out to be 3 in the morning.

When Evi arrived, he was perplexed - expecting to see that the power was out or some other calamity, but instead, the AC unit was running at full blast. He swiped his key card to get into the server room only to find the following situation.

There was about 25 feet of network cable, not taped down, running over the office floor to a wall jack and then under the door into the server room to their server which is conveniently located on a file drawer with the exhaust pointing right at the thermostat.

Evi proceeded to relocate the server to a more permanent location on the rack and then called it a night, but not before auditing the security to the server room. In the morning, things in the office got pretty heated, but this time a misplaced server wasn't to blame.