Another posting from ComWest. The CTO is the sort of person who reads "Information Week" and similar magazines and, every month, has to implement whatever the featured article is about -- what I should have done was sign up for an expedited subscription and then, before he received his copy start suggesting we do whatever the topic that month was...
Anyway, one month they had some article on the advantages of using a badge reader system, so, of course we suddenly had to have that. The CTO calls up a few places and is staggered by the cost -- so, once again he finds the cheapest possible solution and buys it without doing any sort of research.
The next few days are filled with some contractor running wires through the walls, accidentally setting off one of the sprinkler heads with a snake, etc. Eventually they finish up and install the machine that runs the whole system -- its a Windows 95 box that they put in one of hte server rooms, show someone how to enrol badges and then leave -- all goes well until the CTO decides that we need to install a generator so he hires "Generators-R-Us" or someone to install it... Of course they manage to drop power to the building for the better part of a day while trying to install it... The UPSs all run out of battery and the machines go down. They get power back and we go to help the servers come back up...
There's a little green light on the badge reader on the server room door, but nothing happens when I try badge in.... I go find the CTO and ask him for keys to the lock on the server room door -- for "security" reasons he has put both the physical keys and the master override badge in the key-safe... in the server room....
Its the day before the end of quarter and the finance folks are hopping up and down about closing books or something equally bizarre, so we get a hammer from the janitor and break a hole through the wall.......
The Windows 95 machine is sitting on a black screen complaining about Floppy Drive A not working and please to push F1 to continue...