No good deed goes unpunished

It's the late 1990s, and wireless LANs are just taking off at the manufacturer where this IT pilot fish works.

"My company decided to post WLAN access points all throughout the manufacturing section of the company to avoid having to run regular data cables to all the workstations being implemented there," fish says.

"After all the access points were installed and configured correctly with WEP, SSID and channels, everything was running smoothly for about two months."

Then, suddenly, complaints start coming in. Users say their connections are dropping on an apparently random basis — and it's happening sporadically throughout the manufacturing area.

Fish starts collecting details: When did this happen? Time of day? Where were you? Doing what? Nothing pinpoints the specific problem.

But one day, while fish is running tests in the most frequently troubled area of the plant, he hears a phone call come into the office — and fish's own connection drops.

He checks on a suspicion, and he's right: Turns out the manufacturing office has just put in new wireless phones that use the 2.4-GHz frequency — the same frequency as the wireless LAN.

And the drop-off problem began when the new phones were installed.

"I tried to change the channels on each of the access points, but the phones randomly grabbed a channel and used it, thus kicking off any computer that was nearby using that channel," says fish.

"My only real solution for the fix was to replace all the new 2.4-GHz phones with either more expensive ones that could be manually set or get 900-MHz cordless phones."

Fish takes this solution to his boss — who rejects both fish's explanation and his proposal. She hires an outside consultant to fix the problem.

Two weeks of testing later, the pricey consultant sits down with fish and his boss to present his report.

And the boss's confident smirk turns to a frown when the consultant presents his finding.

"His analysis of the problem: Replace the 2.4-GHz phones with 900-MHz ones because they are randomly picking up a channel and kicking the nearby computers off," fish says.

"Needless to say, I never got a thanks or an apology from the boss, and even scored badly on my next review."

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