I’m terrible at logic problems but yet am really good at figuring out things in the real world that others cannot.

For instance in a remote data center that we do not have physical access to, some equipment was installed by the vendor. My job was to figure out using the data available which port an ethernet cable had been plugged into, and to be absolutely sure about it. I had these items to work with:

1) A packing slip containing a list of items of what was included in the equipment shipment, though not where it was installed.

2) Knowledge that one Ethernet cable was plugged into a port on the router (that has many ports)

There was a bit more to it than that, making it more complicated, but I don’t really want to spend a long time on fiber transceivers and their operation, and daughter cards and the like.

But anyway, I was able to figure it out using that one bit of given information (one ethernet cable was plugged in), combined with the packing list, and knowledge of how port numbering on Cisco routers and transceivers work. At the end I was able to pinpoint exactly which port that cable was plugged into without having access to the vendor router remotely and without having physical access to the data center (it’s a thousand miles away).

And yet you give me one of those typical logic problems, an age of the universe could pass and I could not figure it out.