Sometimes you can’t get to here from there.

Sometimes things look impossibe. Like screwing in a screw with a handle directly above it (seriously, if I ever met the person who designed this..)

http://instagram.com/p/lptfx8OZgb

But there’s always a way around things. In this case, I used my fingers to tighten it into place.

Or this screw, which was cross threaded and wouldn’t come out. It didn’t stand up to a pair of channel locks. Sometimes you have to take the hard way.

And sometimes? What you don’t know is a blessing. I don’t have any photos of this unfortunately. But let’s say there was a two storey building, and on the second storey, was a server room, with two 50U racks inside it. You would think – ok, I need to add another one, these two obviously got in here. You enlist some burly gentlemen to help you move the rack up the stairs, and find problem 1 – it doesn’t fit through the back stairs. They take it down the back stairs, and up the front. Problem 2 – it doesn’t fit through the front door standing up, so you lay it down and move it into the corridor in front of the server room. Problem 3 – there are fire sprinklers in the middle of the ceiling, so you can’t stand it up. I scratched my head for a while, and then started removing bits of drop ceiling, until I found a section big enough to get it standing up, without any sprinkler pipes under it. I stood it up, and then went to move it into the server room. Same issue – but found another part of the drop ceiling without pipes to angle it down again to fit through the lower server room door. And it’s done and in place. I went back to the company’s office and asked them how they got the original racks in there?

The older and wiser sysadmin, who I hadn’t been working on for this project, answer sagely: “we built the room around them”. Sometimes not knowing is the solution to your problem. I doubt I would have even tried if I knew that…

alex

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