Then my luck turned. A friend knew a guy, James, who was looking for someone to manage his network. James couldn't pay much, but he wasn't asking for a lot of experience, either -- and he needed someone who could start right away. To my amazement, several phone calls later I found myself employed at 'Paper Trail,' a printer-and-copier dealership in Shadyside.

My first few days went OK. Then, on Wednesday, just as I was sitting down to lunch, PMX, our primary point-of-sales application, went down. From service to accounting, everyone used it. And everyone had their crosshairs on me, ready to shoot if I couldn't get it working fast.

The first thing I discovered was that the application wasn't the problem; the server that ran it was. I found myself standing in front of the server closet (and I do mean closet), rebooting the system over and over again. It would come up fine, I'd start PMX, and -- after a randomly variable number of minutes -- it would crash. After several hours of fruitless trouble-shooting, I bit the bullet and called my boss. He was out of town for a three-day training class. Terrific.

So I hung myself between the server and the wall of the closet like a contortionist in a circus act, one leg on the UPS and one arm hanging from the server rack, sweating in the summertime heat. Then I changed out electrical cords and cables; I scanned the hard drives; I reseated boards. I was so desperate I even reconfigured PMX. And inevitably, after no more than two hours, I'd be back in the closet. That was how I spent my week, while the company sales staff gave me increasingly dirty looks.

That weekend James came back, and the two of us spent most of Sunday taking the server apart and putting it back together. After four hours we discovered the problem: a dying power supply, helped along, no doubt, by the lack of circulation in an un-air-conditioned closet more suited for mops than MIPS. We had PMX running reliably by Monday afternoon.