Well, maybe it's funny now but is wasn't when it happened. We had a pretty simple setup for a customer's home office. Two IP phones using service from cable modem. Cable modem and router were in the basement office (actually a converted bedroom), along with one of the IP phones. The other phone required a Cat 5 cable run upstairs to the family room. Installation went without a hitch, or so we thought.
Within a few days, the customer was on the phone complaining that their upstairs phone goes out every night and comes back on at various times during the day. No problem; perhaps a bad phone so we replace it because it's working fine when we arrive. This goes on for days, at least three trips and two replacement phones, new cable terminations, new cable run. We tried everything. Nothing was working. We figured the only thing we could do is wait until evening and be there when it happened.
Our technician sat there from 5:00 to 7:15 when the phone finally stopped working. The customer just happened to be coming up the stairs from the office at that time. He and the customer quickly run downstairs to see if the downstairs phone is working Sure enough, it works fine. He was really stumped now.
He went back upstairs to find the phone working again! This was getting to be too much. He called me from the site asking me what he should do. I was equally stumped and frustrated about all of this wasted time. Just in the middle of our conversation, the upstairs phone goes dead, right about the same time the customer came back upstairs from the office.
Hmmmmmm. A patern seems to be forming here. Everytime someone is actually in the office, everything works fine. When they leave, the upstairs phone goes dead. Didn't take long to figure it out after we made that connection.
See, it turns out that the top half of the electrical outlet that the router was plugged into was controlled by a light switch in the office. When they would finish for the day, they would turn off the light switches, close the door and call it a night.
There were two switches side by side. One was for the overhead lights. The other was to control the electrical outlet. The customer said "you know, we have always wondered what that switch goes to. We have always just turned them both on and off." We all got a good laugh, a sigh of relief, and yes, the customer offered to pay us for all of our time. We split it with them and chalked it up as a learning experience. All bedrooms are required to have an overhead light OR a switched receptacle. Since this was a former bedroom, well......
