Today I learned that, even in my lowly position, I have a contribution to make to the company I work for.
The central heating system in our office was not working, and a few of my colleagues were complaining about the cold. I took it upon myself to try and get the boiler started up. The central heating boiler is located in a little side room with some other equipment. Mere mortals such as myself are not really supposed to touch it.
Much twiddling of knobs later, it became apparent that the boiler didn’t want to play ball. That’s when I saw the button marked RESET, and a metaphorical light bulb was illuminated above my head. At home, the RESET button is the button to push if the central heating system stops for whatever reason. The office heating system must work the same way, I thought. So I pushed it and pushed it and pushed it some more. Nothing.
At that point I gave up and returned to my room, resigned to spend the rest of the day shivering. Soon, however, I became aware of a problem. People attempting to use their computers were greeted with error messages. People who tried to use the phones found them to be not working.
Turns out that when I tried to activate the central heating, a fuse blew, cutting off power to everything in the room with the central heating boiler, including the office telephone exchange and the main server for the office LAN. So now, the office phone system and our computer network were wiped out. Worse, nobody could remember where the fusebox was, so the problem couldn’t be fixed.
The electrician took an hour to arrive and fix the problem. Then we had to reboot the server and get everyone’s computer back online. During this time, nobody could do any work on the computers and no clients could contact us by telephone. Thanks to me, we lost two hours of work and (probably) several thousand pounds in revenue!
Yep, that’s my contribution… to well and truly screw everything up. 🙂
(I didn’t tell anyone in work that I was the culpable party; I hope my boss isn’t reading this)