I've worked in IT for more than 10 years and have seen numerous examples of basic sloppiness. It's amazing how many places overlook cable management, wire management, and labeling -- at least in key areas such as servers and network racks.
One day when I was working as an IT contractor, I received a work order from a networking group that was located out of state; I was to go to a customer site and deal with an emergency situation. Some switches needed to be fixed and remote access to the switches set up. The estimated time on-site was two hours, and the last line in the work order read, "Network is down at location, so time is critical."
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I arrived and was greeted by a manager who was relatively clueless about the IT infrastructure. Moreover, there weren't any on-site techs because the company's help desk was also located out of state. She took me to "the room with all the wires," a multipurpose area open to anyone that hosted a few servers, two shared workspaces for employees, and a radio charging area.
There were two rail racks. The one on the left had patch panels, switches, some shelves, and enough patch cables for a family of raccoons to make an apartment complex. The 15-, 20-, and 25-foot patch cables connected the patch panels to the switches, which were only 3 or 4 feet apart, and the slack in the cables hung to the floor. The rack on the right had a few servers on it. Surprisingly, the covers for the wire management were there -- but weren't being used.
I found the area I needed and called the designated contact to set up the remote management. The call went straight to voicemail, so I left a message and reached out to my original contact, letting them know I was unable to reach the support person.
While I was waiting for a return call from either contact, I made small talk with the manager to find out what the business did. She informed me it was a customer service firm and a 24/7 operation, and downtime really hurt the bottom line. I was surprised by this because the company had already been out of commission for well over 24 hours.