Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. These are his stories.

"Is your connection working?" Gertrude, Hanzo’s boss, asked one night. Hanzo had been hired by Dresden’s IT department just a few weeks ago.

"I can’t ping Google," Hanzo responded. "Even the university intranet is down."

"I’ll bet it’s that shady gateway of ours," Gertrude said. "Why don’t you go have a look?"

"Sure." Hanzo blushed. "Uh, Do you know where our rackspace is?" He hadn’t yet been given a tour of the Dresden campus.

". . . Actually, I don’t," Gertrude admitted. "After we renovated the Business Science building last year, our equipment’s been pushed all over the place. You’ll have to ask maintenance."

Hanzo sighed. Maintenance treated IT’s equipment like embarrassing relatives: hidden out of sight and mind.

"I’ll be gone a while," Hanzo said. Even with the annoyance of talking to maintenance, he was looking forward to a nice adventure through campus.

Why Should We Know?

A janitor dozed at the front desk in the maintenance department. They were centrally located, convenient for everyone except IT, which was pushed to the far edge of the campus. Hanzo kicked the janitor’s desk, awakening him.

"Kinda late to be asking for us to mop up your office?" the janitor said, eyes half-open.

"I’m Hans M., with IT," Hanzo said. "I need to know where your people moved our rackspace a few months ago."

"Why do you think we’d know?" The janitor almost nodded off again, then seemed to remember something. "Are you here about our toolset?" The janitor looked at Hanzo like he were six years old again and had just gotten into the cookie jar without mother’s permission. "Boy, you’d better get the toolset back up and running, or my boss will be whipping your back!"

Hanzo sighed. "I can if you show me where the rackspace is."

An Unfortunate View

The rackspace was house in a converted classroom at the edge of campus, a building left over from the communist era of East Germany. "Looks like one of my boys is still at work," the janitor said, pointing to a utility wagon outside the door. "Try not to interrupt him."

"If he isn’t tearing it apart," Hanzo muttered as he went inside. The air was stifling hot even for the summer. Is the air conditioning working in here? Hanzo wondered. I wouldn’t be surprised if the CPUs have all separated from the heatsinks.

Hanzo looked over rack after rack for a tower case propped on top somewhere (the gateway had been a simple fileserver in a former life). His footsteps quiet, Hanzo thought he saw a tower unit perched atop the racks when his eyes met a more unpleasant site: bare buttcheeks.

"I didn’t do anything!" the buttcheeks yelled. The man they belonged to turned around, adjusted his utility belt, and stared at Hanzo in fear.

Hanzo paced to the other side of the rack. He found the gateway, the tower case pushed aside. The man was holding some AC duct segments and a drill, which explained why the AC wasn’t working. A single Ethernet cord dangled down the front of the metal rack.

The gateway’s Ethernet port was empty.

"Did you move this?" Hanzo asked the man, his normally even voice cracking just a bit.

"I just pushed it over a little, so I could get to the air vent!"

"You took down the internet connection for the entire campus," Hanzo explained, as he moved the tower back and plugged the Ethernet cord back in.

"I was just trying to fix the AC," the man whispered, defeatedly.

The Five Rings of IT

Hanzo returned to the IT office and checked that the connection was back. Google pinged back, with no more than the usual dropped packets. "‘Pay attention even to trifles,’" Hanzo said, quoting The Book of Five Rings. "It’s full of useful advice for IT, you know."

"You know those people in maintenance won’t learn their lesson," Gertrude said to Hanzo. "Eventually they’ll need that classroom for something else, and we’ll be doing this all over again."

"I know," Hanzo replied. "It’s the eternal, unending struggle between the incompetent and the exacerbated."

"I guess I’d better go buy a katana," Gertrude said.



Photo credit: MelvinPrice / Foter / CC BY

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