Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

'If I wasn't already taking blood pressure meds, I'm sure I would not have survived'

Who, Me? Nobody starts the working week by planning to fail, but mistakes do happen and The Register likes to write about them in Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you tell us how you escaped from nasty scrapes of your own making.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kane" who told us about a job he said was "the most horrendous and grueling experience of my IT career."

"If I wasn't already taking blood pressure meds, I'm sure I would not have survived," he wrote.

Kane took on this terrifying job when he worked for a giant global hardware vendor and was asked to help an account executive sell a big batch of new servers to an existing customer.

The buyer wasn't keen, because the vendor had provided it with switches that were causing problems with virtual LANs.

Kane's sales colleagues put a question to the customer: "If we fix the switches, will you consider the new servers?"

The customer liked that idea, which is how Kane found himself at its offices one Saturday morning trying to fix a VLAN-related "partial outage" that had taken out much of its SAP implementation.

You'd think that when a giant global hardware vendor sends in a techie to fix that sort of thing, they'd be well-trained.

And Kane was very well trained – but on the new kit his employer hoped to sell and not on the glitching switch.

"I decided to show the customer how to make the changes with the web-based config pages," he told Who, Me? "I'd never been told not to use the GUI so I saw no problems with using it."

Unbeknown to Kane, the GUI was buggy.

"I ended up causing a Layer 2 broadcast storm that brought down most of the network," he confessed.

SAP was now unable to reach its external storage and looked, at first glance, to be utterly dead.

"I imagined that I had wrecked their ERP and there was no telling how long it would take to fix," Kane told Who, Me?

This was probably the point at which those blood pressure meds paid for themselves.

Fortunately, the infrastructure on which SAP ran was well-designed and properly resilient. It didn't take much work to get the network and the ERP working again.

But the client was not impressed, and a rival vendor scooped the sale.

Have you messed up a sales pitch? Pitch us your story by clicking here to send email to Who, Me? We'd love to share your story on a future Monday. ®