Okay, sure. This one isn’t weird or creepy, but it’s definitely in line with the whole “infrastructural gothic” thing, and anybody who’s worked corporate may find the circumstances of it hauntingly familiar.
Another gig for a local telecom (though a different one from the vending machine story): I’d been tasked to track down a phantom server. It was an old database box - probably it’d been running for twenty years at that point - and it was normally administered remotely.
Well, it had finally developed an issue that needed to be addressed in person - and here’s the catch: owing to the company’s high staff turnover (to say that they had a personnel retention problem would be an understatement), there was literally no-one left who’d ever laid eyes on the thing. In fact, nobody knew where it was physically located at all!
I ended up having to work backwards, mapping out the building’s network topology, identifying the nearest router whose physical location was known, and physically tracing the cabling as it snaked through the walls and ceilings in order to find where it ended up.
(Luckily, the phantom server had been set up before wireless networking was commonplace - otherwise the little bastard could have been anywhere.)
Finally I narrowed it down to the exact cable the phantom server was using to communicate with the outside world. Nothing can ever be straightforward, though, so a new problem faced me: the cable disappeared under a baseboard on one side of a wall and simply never came out the other side. That was a big problem: if it ran for any distance inside the wall, I might have had to start tearing out drywall in order to figure out where it went.
Before anybody broke out the sledgehammers, it occurred to me that the dimensions weren’t adding up. In the absence of a floorplan, I had to eyeball some measurements, but it seemed like there was a gap of several feet between one side of the offending wall and the other, about what you’d expect if there was a closet there - but there was no door to be found.
Long story short, it turned out that what had happened is that at some point in the preceding decade, an inattentive (or perhaps simply overzealous) contractor had drywalled over the door to a server closet, without first checking whether there was anything inside. Since the phantom server was remotely administered, and it had never had a problem demanding physical intervention before that point, nobody had noticed that it was now literally sealed inside a wall, all Cask of Amontillado style.
My job was simply to find the thing, not to fix it, so I never did find out how the situation was resolved, but I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall at the resulting meetings.
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