Network Engineer's Nightmare

Literally. A nightmare.

You know how when you get steeped in something in the waking world, sometimes it bleeds over to your dreams. Like, guys who work in supply warehouses start having dreams about millions of boxes. Stuff like that. Well... damnit, it's happened to me.

Recently, I've been doing a *lot* of network design. I've been working nearly constantly with switches, routers, redunant gateways, redundant physical paths, (insert long line of technical jargon like Virtual Router Redunancy Protocol and Spanning Tree Protocol etc...) to the point of madness.

Well, last night, I dreamed I was standing in front a switch. A big Cisco switch. Now, when I say big, I don't mean it had a lot of ports in it. I mean the damned thing was BIG. Like, six feet tall. The data ports on it were three or four feet across. The patch cables that went into it were a good three feet around. The problem in this dream, was that we didn't have enough of these ENORMOUS patch cables. And unfortunately, we had a major uptime requirement that just couldn't be broken. The systems must stay up. There were two of us. And we came up with an idea to keep the systems up. My co-worker would go into the switch (and by into, I mean literally walk into the damned thing instead of log into it) and try to implement a software work-around. My job? Switching frames.

Yes. The frames were about four feet long, translucent, weighed about a pound, and were maybe four inches wide and three inches tall. I could read the source and destination mac addresses that were etched into these "frames." They came out of one giant switch port, and my job was to read the source and destination mac addresses off of them, and carry them over to the correct destination port, and throw them in. Yes. I was a VLAN.

I nearly woke up screaming.

I think I need to find a new career as a construction laborer or something.