From the Diary of a Data Center Engineer – “An Admin’s Mood Swing: How I Reinstalled 60 Devices”

Episode 7

This is a story I heard second-hand, but I’ll tell it as if I were there — because sometimes only a first-person perspective can truly capture the drama. 🙂

The server room… a place where time stands still and where you quickly realize your purpose in life is… to install switches. Not once, not twice, but dozens of times — like it’s your personal mission. I thought nothing could surprise me anymore. I had practically become a resident of one of those “special” server rooms. You know the kind — the projects that start as small upgrades and end in full-blown overhauls with new gear, systems, and cabling. You say to yourself: “One more week, maybe two,” and a year later, you’re still in the same basement.

But this time, fate (read: the system administrator) had a little surprise in store for me.

We were at the final stage — two long days of tedious work behind us. Everything patched, all devices connected, racks tidy, almost ready to power it all up. I could already feel the satisfaction of wrapping things up.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, the admin walks into the server room, glances over our work, and says:

“No, no… this won’t do. Take it all down and redo it.”

The network guy had told us to install the equipment a certain way, but now the visionary on the admin team had discovered his inner feng shui master. Switches? Different order. Cables? Move them to the other side. Devices? Clearly, they must be mounted two centimeters to the left.

60 devices.

Sixty! Already placed, patched, fastened in the racks. And now — BAM — everything had to be redone. And this isn’t just plugging things back in. It’s hours of unscrewing, rearranging, and reinstalling. Like someone hit rewind and said: “Back to square one, guys!”

Life of a Network Admin – What It’s Really Like to Install Switches in a Data Center

Installing switches in a server room demands precision, patience, and mental stamina. Every device has a specific spot, cables need to be routed with order and logic. And just when you’ve got everything dialed in — tightened, labeled, aligned — someone with a “new vision” walks in and wants to change it all. Just like this.

After a year in the same basement server room, I stopped counting the hours I’d spent mounting gear. I was done. You know that feeling — when you spend too much time in one place? You see the same walls, same racks, same switches. Even the dust starts to irritate you — because somehow, it looks exactly the same every day.

When Exhaustion Hits – Take a Break

So how do you cope in moments like this? When you’re so tired you want to walk out and never come back?

You find a way to reset.

Me? I started playing… basketball. Yep, you read that right. In the server room.

My “balls” were plastic cage nuts used for rack mounting. I made makeshift balls and tossed them into rack holes, aiming for cable entry points. Three points!

Some may find that odd — but after 14 hours of rewiring, any form of release is welcome. And if it means you don’t throw your laptop across the room or shove cables where they don’t belong — that’s a win.

Despite the madness — I love this job.

Because at the end of the day, when you see a perfectly organized rack of gear, you feel like, for once, you’ve beaten the chaos.

Well… at least until the admin changes his mind again.

So remember —

When life throws cables at your feet, make a game out of it.