What could happen?

I started my new job last Thursday. It's quite a step up from where I was before, and my new boss is one of my good friends, so I jumped at the chance to work here. The goal for my first day was to simply learn all I could about my new responsibilities, and meet all my new co-workers, etc.

It's a smallish company, and the IT staff consists of two people. Jeremy is the manager, and Chris is the only other employee. He's the guy I'll be replacing.

Chris still had two days left when I started, so it would give me a good chance to learn all I could from him while he was still here.

Thee things happened to me on this first day that I will mention.

(1.) After grilling Jeremy about the job, I knew that most of the folks in the office were gone by 5:00pm. So, on the morning of first day, I showed up at 5 minutes to 8.

There was no one there. Well, at least it looked that way. The front double-doors were closed, and I assumed locked. Just to be sure, I walked up and gently tried to turn the handle. Yep, locked. As I turned around to walk back outside, I heard the beeping start. As it got louder, I realized that I had just set off the alarm.

Nuts.

Here I am, wondering around the hallway on my first day having just set off the alarm. As I stood there trying to decide whether to run out to my car or wait around for the first employee to show up, my decision was made for me. Around the corner came the President of the company. He greeted me, then as we got close to the door, said "did you jiggle the doorknob or something?". I admitted that I did, but it didn't seem to bother him. He walked up to the doors, pulls out his pocket knife, and jams it into the space between the doors. He manages to pop it open, then shuts off the alarm. Didn't even think about using a key.

He turned on the TV in the conference room to check the news (this was the day of the London bombings) and told me I could just hang out there until Jeremy or Chris arrived. 45 minutes later, they show up.

(2.) So we get on with the business of teaching me everything Chris knows. As we are in the server room about an hour later, Chris shows me the back wall where the Internet connection, phone systems, and Cisco routers are in one big rack. They are all powered by one big Power Supply that they had been having some trouble with. There's a big plug in the front, and Jeremy walks into the server room, looks at the plug, and pulls it out to look at it. That kills the battery backup, but he says "It's OK as long as we don't lose power".

Yeah, famous last words.

He plugs it back in, but it doesn't come back on. No worries, he'll take a look at it after he gets back from the CEO's house. (He had to go fix his e-mail or something.)

I'll bet you can guess what happens next. While Jeremy is out of the office, Chris and I are going over some of his job functions. The lights flicker, things start beeping, and lots of people start talking. Someone comes over and tells Chris the phones are down, and the look on his face is priceless. We take off running to the server room, and sure enough, the brown-out took down all of the routers and the phone system. The UPS is still dead, so we hastily plug everything into a non-UPS wall outlet just to get work going again. As long as the power doesn't go out again, it should work as a temporary fix...

Jeremy eventually comes back, and we pull apart the UPS to find that in unplugging it the first time, Jeremy had actually broken one of the connectors. When we leave the room, I have to step around the broken UPS, and (3.) end up tearing my pants against one of the breaker boxes.

All in all, it was a fun day.