"H... hello?" Cid groaned, looking at his clock. It was 4:53 AM.
"Hi, good morning, is this Cid? I hope I'm not waking you up."
No, I'm always awake at four goddamn fifty goddamn three in the goddamn morning, Cid thought. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. "I'm sorry, who is this?"
"It's Dave at the datacenter. We've got a big issue here! UK customers can't reach uk.initrodeglobal.com."
"OK, Dave," Cid sighed, cursing his luck for being assigned to 24 hour support for the week. "Can you reach it from your workstation?"
"Let me check... no"
"OK, can you ping it?"
The line fell silent, except for the sound of typing. "Nope, not responding." Hmm, maybe a firewall issue, thought Cid.
"OK, do this for me, go to the datacenter," Cid ordered. A few seconds later, Dave reported that he'd arrived.
"All right, do you see a big orange box labeled 'uk.initrodeglobal.com?'" asked Cid.
Dave searched the area. "N... no. Not seeing it."
"Really? Because I'm serious about the thing being bright orange, and it has a big yellow label on it. You really don't see it?"
"No, I can't see anything."
"You don't see anything?"
"No, it's too dark."
"Dave..." Cid began carefully, not wanting to insult Dave's intelligence, "...are the lights on?"
"Oh, no. You didn't tell me to turn them on."
Cid let out an exasperated sigh and collapsed on his bed, seeing that it was now 5:04 AM. He'd have to get up in less than two hours.
"OK, the lights are on, and I found it. It's bright orange and labeled 'uk.initrodeglobal.com,' just like you said!"
"Good. Is there a light under something that says 'WAN?'" asked Cid.
"How do you spell tha- oh, wait, I see it. There's a light, but it's turned off."
"OK, the cable that's plugged in under it — trace it back to the switch."
"Oh! When I grabbed the cable, it made the WAN light start blinking on and off!"
A bad network cable, thought a relieved Cid. I'll be able to get back to wonderful, wonderful sleep soon. "OK, I need you to grab another network cable and swap it."
"But the network cable's not the problem," argued a defiant Dave, "it works when I move the cable to the side a bit."
After five minutes of arguing, bargaining, begging, and pleading, Cid finally got Dave to switch the cable. It fixed the problem, so Cid tried to wrap up the call.
"Well, if that's it, you should be all set, but you can call me if-"
"Wait, there's another problem!" interrupted Dave. "This other thing has a blinking light — you have to help me fix this one, too!"
"Dave, is it labeled 'ACT?'"
"Ye-"
"Leave that one alone." Cid reasoned that terminating all network traffic would't be a good way to start his day.