Scavenging and Improvisation

Waste of things I could use bothers me in my soul, like lost potential. And I despise a messy work environment and go on cleaning cycles once the mess reaches a critical mass (usually well under that of most others).

I was two weeks on this job. We had a datacenter, but with the contract flipped to another contractor, our contractor's building was no longer ours. So the datacenter was moving. It would be a temporary primary until we built a new one and it became a coop site, ultimately to be refreshed as well.

It was a mess, especially after our own contractor clipped the cables and pulled most racks out wholesale.

It was also a treasure trove of parts, racks and good cables that I currently didn't have. I made a few scavenging runs for smaller things back to the old building until my boss pulled me aside to explain that I didn't need to worry about the things left behind, and that with the new contract we were going to have plenty of money.

I trusted him, but I didn't trust his words. Show me the money. Show me that I can identify a need and take delivery within two weeks. Of course, I nodded, understandingly. Days later, in a moment of idle time I went back and grabbed more items it struck me I could use.

Finally, good-naturedly, he told me "Dave, stop". There is a time when your boss gives you an instruction and you follow it. And there's a time when he gives you an instruction, and you know that you will likely be forgiven if you disregard it -- under very particular circumstances. I hope I've properly figured out which is which. I exerted all effort and paused.

We didn't have our supplies yet, but we also didn't have a pressing need. It bothered me that when I would have that need, I might not have what I needed. It was instinctive more than real thought.

I waited a few weeks, until the bug was back. I had stripped a lot of cables out... but there were at least 300 behind the 2-post racks, already plug-terminated for the old patch panels. There was a brand-new APC NetShelter rack, doors, panels, trays, everything, that I was loathe to relinquish to the impending trash day. I'd grabbed an enormous amount of other parts, including cable organizers, PDUs and pre-terminated cable bundles for those same racks.

When the team went back to move some other equipment (our Comms team had their own wishlist), I went with them and traded my help for theirs in extracting the APC rack.

We had no space in the under-construction server room so I put it in the temporary office I shared with the senior systems engineer.

After a couple more trips I had stripped the place bare of anything conceivably useful. I saw my boss often. He saw that rack often. He decided not to take issue with it. I made sure to be a credit to him in every other way possible.

It might have been premonition. The money was there, technically, but for months it was usable, then not, then again, and then not... problems far higher up in the food chain. Scattered cables and miscellany would come, but nothing bigger.

Many others seemed perfectly content with the delays. I would have been crawling walls.

For months what I and my colleague had was what I had scavenged. It was enough to get us by.

The rack in my office (our only proper four-poster for a whole year) became heavily used as a pre-staging rack and for testing my routers and my colleague's servers. All of the salvaged tools and cables went neatly organized into cabinets and shelves. Old routers and switches became our improvised test lab and spare devices store. When the new datacenter was finally completed, the rack moved in and housed our poor-man's version of my new architecture long before the real things were bought.

And by and large I felt vindicated each time I needed something, it was there. When others needed things, I grinned proudly (internally) and brought it out. We used nearly everything of what I had taken.

Moreover, it was clean, well-ordered, ship-shape Bristol-fashion as they say.

Months later, our team became aware of a large cache of network equipment being given away by our parent bureau. Now, my boss gave me first dibs on the list and I researched and highlighted away. More treasure. (On the other hand, it is frightening what brand-new things our government buys and never uses -- this wasn't garbage by any standard). We didn't need most of it right then and there. In two months I would use half of it.

Amidst the tiny lingering guilt of disobedience, I look back on that as probably my proudest moment in scavenging. And admittedly, my boss was a fair one. He permitted a number of eccentricities as I pushed his infrastructure forward aggressively.

Every now and then, I interview an engineer. Take him or her to your technology playground and watch their eyes. The good ones tend to be silent for a while, their eyes darting around as they take in the stock of what you have. They are evaluating the potential of this new environment, estimating what has been done, what needs to be done, what they will do beyond what you have.

If they've got a plan in mind, amidst the expectation of scarcity scavenging comes naturally, where they are loathe to be stalled by something as mundane as procurement delays. If at all a part will work, now or later, they put it in place for the time being. Good engineers will strip everything in sight bare to make sure that when they need something it's there for them later. It's only in times of obvious and proven excess that this instinct is permitted to lapse.

They see a system where others see a jumble of parts.

They see potential.

They already have a plan.

They will not be stopped.