None of us would say we enjoy the view from the office more than the one you get while out in the countryside cycling. The picture above is a snapshot of one of my favorite cycling routes. Obviously, it's never made it onto any CV or Resume. But a Resume doesn't truly capture your work experience. It can't tell the story of those unforgettable moments...

• I went to Grey.

• I learnt to programme on a ZX-81.

• I was a COBOL programmer on an IBM mainframe using JCL and embedded SQL off DB2.

• I brought the country to a standstill.

• I was an expert in maximizing memory in DOS while loading Smart Madge Token-ring adapters while using the Netbeui, IPX, and SNA protocols.

• My first connection to the Internet was using a US Robotics Courier modem. Later I even used ISDN.

• I was on Springbok Radio as a guest talking about my Andabatae PC program that I had developed for blind operators.

• I appeared on Irish TV for an interview after a Boks game at Lansdowne Road.

• I once had to visit a car factory due to intermittent network problems in their paint shop. When I arrived at the network cabinet, it was covered in pigeon droppings. The poo was actually corroding the network chassis. That was a moment of being in a tough spot.

• A colleague once used a desktop fan to cool telecommunications equipment. The fan's bearings failed, and the resulting smoke caused the gas to be dumped in the data center. All of this happened on December 31, 1999, right when the clock was ticking down to the new millennium. That's when everything hit the fan!

• Someone installed equipment in a cabinet without putting the tops on the electrical power plugs. I reached in to reset a router and got quite a shocking experience.

• An air conditioner iced up in the data center, unnoticed over time, and created a small pond beneath the floor. We had to use an industrial wet and dry vacuum cleaner to pump out the water, and, well, we broke the vacuum cleaner, but at least we solved the problem.

• While working at an ISP, a building was under construction next door. A customer's car ended up encased in concrete from a bucket that fell from ten floors up.

• A pipe started leaking in a network room, and the closest thing we had to prevent a disaster was placing an umbrella over the network switch.

• The water mains ruptured on the top floor of the building, causing operations to shut down for a day...

• The water reservoir on the roof sprung a leak, causing the ceiling boards to collapse and end up on our desks.

• A user in one department installed a server on his desk, and the whole department started using it. When it eventually crashed, he came over and asked where the backup was!

• A building was remodeled, and the kitchen was placed right above the data center. The geyser in the kitchen burst...

• The data center actually burnt down, and the fire department arrived to finish off the equipment by drowning it all.

• Air conditioners were installed in the data center, but their start cycle wasn't sequenced. On the first power failure, the generator started, all the air conditioners came online, overloaded the circuit, and the generator shut down. This repeated until the starter battery on the generator exploded. I was standing a few meters away and had to change my shorts afterward.

• The first time in the tunnels under the airport to test a cable, I encountered a rat the size of a dog. I nearly screamed for my mommy.

• Cable spaghetti is common, but add torn-off pieces of paper attached as labels to the cables using discarded telephone cable to tie them on, and you have the winner of the messiest data center in the world.

• Then, there was the battle of Luthuli house, and when the AK47’s started shooting, I did the office floor leopard crawl.

• Same car factory as the pigeon incident. A Peterbilt truck collided with the data center. It felt like an earthquake.

• In 1991 I received a R250,000 mainframe processing bill for creating a branch line report.

• The network failed because the 10Base2 terminator heated up in the sun and increased the resistance.

• There was also the network switch that was covered in fat from cooking because it was located above the stove in the canteen.

• Spanning the core switch trunks to each other once, and the entire network went dark.

• Loading OS/2 with 17 1.44" diskettes, multiple times, and sometimes on the same server!

• One day, during a change management meeting, I put my foot in the dustbin and couldn't extract it. Everyone in the meeting was LMAOROFL.

• I was once reading a network magazine and saw the phone number of a video conference unit in one of the case study pictures. I decided to test it and dialed into the Anglo-American Board meeting.

• A new guy started working at the office. He was troubleshooting why the Windows net message wasn’t working for a user. He logged onto the company domain controller and broadcast “WHY THE F**K DOES THIS NOT WORK?” to all computer screens in the company.

• We decided to install a fake blue screen saver on the main company file server as a joke. The administrator walked past, saw the screen, and switched the power off on the server.

• There was a screen saver called Johnny Castaway that killed the NIC on a PC. On a token-ring network, this resulted in shotgunning as the relays opened and closed trying to resolve the problem.

• I've seen my life flash before my eyes many times. I often work on networks with fault-tolerant paths. When one path fails, everyone is still connected because the alternative path is being used. A network engineer is dispatched to fix the broken path but instead unplugs or works on the remaining live path. Next moment, total blackout!!!!

• The IT systems guys once typed in the specification for launching new products using an article from MyBroadband because no one emailed them the internal product description.

• An employee once phoned from New Zealand, saying he had immigrated and could he carry on working from home? He had asked to take a day off work because he had broken his toe (doctor's note in tow) and then disappeared. He never resigned; he really thought he could telecommute... Fired his a**!

• Downing a bottle of Tequila before starring as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a Rocky Horror skit at a team-building function.

• The Internet was burnt down in 6th October City.

• The surveillance camera was disabled in the NOC because recording activities was considered a constitutional violation of rights.

• The air conditioners in the data center failed, again. The data center overheated. It was decided to leave the servers on and open the doors for ventilation!

• Most data centers have designated hot and cold aisles. After a night of mounting servers, the server team realized that they had mounted the servers the wrong way around when they switched them on. The hot air was blowing into the cold aisle. They left it like that instead of correcting the problem.

• There were two cabling contractors who disconnected the SAA mainframe while pulling through a CAT 5 cable under the data center floorboards. Then, I helped the IT manager with our first mainframe cold boot attempt.

• Then, there was the employee who, after a drunken office party, decided to take a dump on the Head of IT's desk (and not realizing there was a security camera!).

• Trying to persuade the data center manager of a leading ISP in South Africa to use IoT. He said he didn't need it as he has security guards monitoring an LED panel with HVAC alarms on it.

• Discovering that the top-of-the-range Cisco firewalls at the Telkom campus took 20 minutes to boot as they were configured with two million rules.

• Being accused of inappropriate behavior in a Zoom call when commenting about a noisy hadeda by international conference participants who have no idea what a hadeda is...

• Chasing rogue DHCP servers!

• Scratching my head and troubleshooting network problems for months till I'm blue in the face. Log a dozen tickets against the ISP only to discover a dodgy demarc install by the ISP onsite.

• Persuading the high school headmaster to buy an Apple IIe, which was then used for people to learn how to program. One of those people was the guy who gave the world the Cisco licensing scheme.

• Seeing my life flash before my eyes when a building's scaffolding collapsed. Being a network engineer can be a dangerous occupation.

• Deleting the /var directory on the server.

• I had a chat on Radio 702 on how I crashed into a camouflaged bollard at the Rosebank Shopping Centre in my car.

• Whilst in the Navy I cut my feet on broken glass in a tidal pool and the military doctor threaten to charge me for damage to government property.

• I invented the Morning to Midnight data bundles which Vodacom assimilated as Night Owl.

• I was forced to drink a Flaming Lamborghini because I rocked up at a Novell Netware event in a Microsoft Certified Pig t-shirt. I was one of the first in South Africa to be dual certified.

• The NOC engineer at iBurst who said the whole network was down because his network cable was frayed from his office chair rolling over it repetitively.

• While at iBurst the radio and network departments were arguing about why a site was unstable. Eventually drove out there and discovered the landlord had positioned the exhaust of his generator on the inlet of the container which was now covered in oil on the inside.

• I became known as the King of Netware SFT III as I was able to make the cluster stable by tuning Madge FDDI adapters.

• The whole Cabletron office in New Hampshire watched as walked around an iced over pond in front of their building which had mirror glass. Blissfully unaware, I jumped up and down on the ice and attempted to crack it using rocks.

• I flow in a Boeing 707 to a Novell conference at Elephant Hills. I survived going down the rapids on the Zambezi on my ass as I fell out of the raft.

• I was in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 SP at 45 000 feet when we were still allowed up front!

• I have a patent for a power monitoring device.

• I decided on a good April's Fool joke. Nothing happened, but two weeks later it was headlines on the national news.

• I have the largest collection of bowiea volubilis in the world!

• I have created the best SD-WAN blog in the world!

• I learnt to drive on a Massey-Ferguson tractor. My first car was a VW Beetle.

• I broke my leg in 27 places when the maul collapsed onto my leg which was over the ball.

• I'm physically impaired by being blind in one eye.

• I'm on a school honours board at Grey, just above the one on which Bram Fischer is recorded.

• I completed the Argus Cycle Tour more than 10 times with the first being on my every day university driver.

How does one even list these experiences?

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Ronald Bartels ensures that Internet inhabiting things are connected reliably online at Fusion Broadband South Africa - the leading specialized SD-WAN provider in South Africa.

Please comment below about the experiences you don't have on your resume but should really crack the nod!