From the Diary of a Data Center Engineer – “Careful What You Grab: A Switch’s Fall from Grace”

Sometimes in an engineer’s life, you’re faced with the big existential questions. Like: “Does network equipment feel cold?” Or: “How far can you bend a switch port before it stops working?”
I found the answers to both on a freezing night during a trip to install a large switch.
 
We were scheduled to begin work early in the morning, but since we arrived from another city late at night, we decided to crash at a hotel. Then came the dilemma — do we leave our precious switch in the car overnight or take it inside to the warmth? I, being the sentimental type (now I know — sentimental and naive), believed it would be cruel to subject the switch to icy suffering. My colleague argued that IT hardware isn’t exactly delicate. After a brief back-and-forth, which can be summed up as, “It’ll be fine” vs. “You sure about that?”, he simply said, “Then go ahead, take it.”
 
So I did.
 
I grabbed it by the part that felt easiest to carry — and proudly hauled it inside.
Now, for anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of lifting an enterprise-class switch: it has handles on the back, which — as I later learned — are part of the fan assembly and not load-bearing structural components.
 
We got into the elevator. It started moving, and suddenly I felt… light. Too light.
I looked down — in my hands were just the handles.
The switch, having suddenly rediscovered gravity, decided to intimately introduce itself to the floor. The crash sounded like a pocket full of coins hitting concrete — if those coins were made of industrial-grade metal and cost a small fortune.
 
I looked at my colleague. He looked at me. That look… priceless.
It was the exact moment when neither of us wanted to be the one to ask: “So… what now?”
 
After a short period of gathering ourselves — and the pieces — off the elevator floor (thankfully, this was before 100G ports were common, so it wasn’t total carnage), we made the only reasonable decision: pretend nothing happened and go to sleep.
We’d deal with the problem in the morning.
 
And in the morning?
When we opened the switch, we were greeted by a work of art in the style of network cubism. Some of the ports looked like they’d been through a paper shredder. Bent pins, twisted connectors — basically everything you don’t want to see before a long day of installation.
 
For the uninitiated — when ports get bent like that, cables might never sit right again. That means not just unreliable connections, but an entire afternoon of tinkering with, “Maybe if we just press here…”
 
We applied the MacGyver Method: a mix of force, finesse, a few unrepeatable incantations, and a bit of backup hardware.
After several hours of battling with it, the switch was back in shape — and so were we.
 
The moral of the story?
First — read the manual. Know what to grab, and what not to grab.
Second — if you mess up, make sure you’ve got a solid colleague who’ll help pick up the pieces (literally).
And third — maybe… just maybe… the trunk wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.
 
Ever grabbed the wrong part of a switch?