Lucky shot
Our council Blantyre office kept on dropping out in '93, intermittently, and this was my responsibility. Our comms boards and muxes were ancient and flaky so swap them out, trial and error. It'd start working, problem solved, then fall over again. Firmware and config on the boards, firmware and config on the multiplexors, line tests on the line. Constant unanswered calls to BT blaming their ISDN line that they said checked out perfectly. And this was 40 staff cut off repeatedly, and thousands of people unable to get housing benefits, it was high profile.
I'd been an electronics guy but this was a council so no electronics kit until the IT director started getting political flak. I got a blank cheque for a decent meter, an oscilloscope and a frequency generator to fault find the line. Nothing, and my job starts looking dubious. Three frigging months of frustration and self-doubt and then I caught and recorded the line fault.
Turns out somebody had shot the overhead ISDN cable, but the pellet only shorted the line in high gusts of wind. Why would someone shoot an overhead cable? Blantyre. I eventually got a written apology from BT that I framed and put on my wall the way over people frame their academic qualifications.
Same job, I was on call out for numerous wrong burglar alarms and that was a pain because 65 mile commute. There was a bug in one of the PIR sensors. Literally a bug, some wee beetle had made it it's home and would return every morning to sleep.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
