Comment by whitten

I’m trying to track down an old story about the network not working in a firm on Wednesday morning near 7 am.

I remember the details being that only on Wednesday did they use the freight elevator to deliver donuts to an all-staff meeting and when they did, the network would fritz.

It turned out that if you move a very large electromagnet (on the elevator) along the network cable, it makes the network go crazy.

Combine that with cable-pullers that rather than putting holes in multiple ceilings and floors in the cable closet, saw that the elevator shaft was a pre-existing hole between floors anyway, simply took the path of least resistance and hilarity (and a real hard network debugging problem) ensues.

Does anyone know when or where this anecdote occurred ?