When IT Planning Meets Construction Chaos: Tales From the Forgotten Network Closet
There’s a special brand of anxiety reserved for IT professionals tasked with building out networks in brand new facilities—especially when those facilities are still a maze of unfinished drywall, shifting priorities, and a project plan that only exists in the imaginations of a dozen overworked managers. If you’ve ever tried to lay network cable in a place where the only thing more uncertain than the schedule is where the walls will eventually be, you’ll recognize the flavor of chaos in today’s story.
Enter u/critchthegeek, whose tale from r/TalesFromTechSupport is less a gentle trip down memory lane and more a madcap sprint through a construction site with a coil of CAT5 and a prayer. From missing plans to last-minute demands, let’s see what happens when the network is an afterthought and “temporary” solutions become all too permanent.
Blueprint Mayhem: When Plans Are Optional
Imagine you’re tasked with planning the network for a major manufacturing plant expansion—think new warehouse, auto-boxing, shiny breakrooms, and a massive shipping dock. You’re promised detailed CAD plans, so you map out where every Intermediate Distribution Frame (IDF) and network drop should go. You consult with everyone, ask those all-important “What Ifs,” and submit your designs to the contractors.
But then, the production team decides to light up the new shipping docks before the warehouse is even finished. Your carefully chosen IDF location? Pushed to the very last building phase. The fiber install? Delayed. Suddenly, your “strategic” network closet is as useful as a snow shovel in July.
As u/critchthegeek recounts, “Ended up wall mounting an IDF at about 90m from an existing IDF so strung copper CAT5 and got enough drops and Wifi APs running to get production happy.” Sometimes you just have to MacGyver it—because in IT, “temporary” always means “at least five years.”
The IT Afterthought: Infrastructure on the Back Burner
If you’re thinking, “This sounds familiar,” you’re not alone. The Reddit crowd chimed in with war stories of their own. u/6poundpuppy nailed the sentiment for non-techies: “Even tho 99% of what you said flew over me by a mile…I certainly get the gist... The bigger the project, the more you get left behind or forgotten altogether.”
This isn’t just a one-off problem—it’s practically an industry tradition. As u/StuBidasol wryly put it, “Nobody bothers to take IT seriously until something doesn't work. And even when it's their fault, it's your fault it's not working right.”
The comments overflow with tales of project managers who’d rather spend money on decorative plants than network closets, and last-minute scrambles to install cabling that “was definitely in the plans” (spoiler: it wasn’t). u/Impossible_IT recounted a nightmare where missing network cabling cost an extra $250K after the fact—an expensive reminder that infrastructure isn’t just an IT problem, it’s everyone’s problem.
Lessons Learned: Overbuilding Beats Underbudgeting
So what’s the solution when IT planning is an afterthought? Overbuild, overcommunicate, and always, always document. As several commenters pointed out, planning for growth is key. u/GeorgeGorgeou’s rule of thumb? “User says x network drops … install 3x.” (And never a singleton drop—users will want that printer the moment you walk out the door.)
Reddit user u/syntaxerror53 shared the wisdom of installing double sockets by default: “Also for redundancy and, SOD's Law, another point would be required sometime in the future.” This isn’t paranoia—it's survival. Because as the original post proves, those temporary solutions have a way of becoming very permanent, especially when the original project scope was never written down and the general contractor gets swapped halfway through.
Some IT pros, like u/lokis_construction, learned these lessons the hard way: “Cabling was always on my mind and I had to fight to be sure it was included and properly sized and all pathways identified.” The true veterans know: design for more, check the plans yourself, and never trust that your requests made it past the second round of “value engineering.”
The Human Factor: Sisyphus in a Server Closet
The real kicker? Half the time, you’re not just battling blueprints—you’re wrestling with people. In this story, the “project manager” was a fresh-faced quasi-industrial engineer, up against a herd of seasoned contractors who “knew every trick.” One commenter, u/xyzzytwistymaze, recalled stepping in to rescue a university dorm project only to discover that, once the design was “too far along,” no change was possible. The resulting network was a tangle of compromises, and the poor IT staff who inherited it surely cursed their predecessors every time they touched a patch panel.
It’s a reminder that, as much as we love to blame “the plans,” the real chaos comes from communication gaps, shifting priorities, and the eternal war between IT and everyone else. As the dust finally settled in our tale, u/critchthegeek was left with three IDFs instead of one, more network than anyone planned for, and the satisfaction that, despite it all, production kept humming.
Conclusion: Share Your Battle Scars
If you’ve ever been the last one looped into a construction meeting or had to explain (again) why Wi-Fi doesn’t work through 18 inches of concrete, you’re in good company. The comments on this post are a testament to the universal struggle of IT pros everywhere: infrastructure is invisible until it breaks, and sometimes you just have to make it work—one hastily-mounted network closet at a time.
Have your own “networking nightmare” story? Drop it below. And remember: always plan for triple the drops, double the headaches, and at least one “temporary” fix that lasts forever.
Original Reddit Post: Just a minor problem with timing