This is the foolishness I need to put up with at work. So, I fall asleep around 7:30, and wakee up to the cell phone ringing - it's almost 8:30. The tier II guy tells me there is an outage at a site, and explains that 2 slots on the ethernet switch have dropped links. He tells me that he swapped a cable from slot 1 (link down) with one from slot 3 (link up). Then slot 1 getes a link up and slot 3 is down. I tell him that this points to a cable problem.
We get the site guy to go to the rack with the affected devices and tell us how many cables he sees on the back of the cards. He tells us 1 - there should be 2. Turns out that the ethernet cable is missing from each of the affected devices. Now we spend an hour running in circles, because the site guy refuses to beleive that the ethernet cables are gone, because none of them touched anything. After several attempts - including asking the site guy if he sees ethernet cables in an ethernet port on any card, to asking him if he sees any cables lying around that are labled as beinng connected to the switch - it was painfully obvious that this guy was utterly useless.
So, now in the process of moving customers over to cards with connections.
BTW, this is something that is typical of telecom companies, be it AT&T, Sprint (which was a common occurance for a co-worker here who used to work for Sprint), Verizon (who almost daily seems to have misconfigurations taking down something of ours - well Intermedia's), or others.