10) During a rewiring party you come across 300-baud modems, and they're still being used

9) The U.S. Army asks to use your patch panel as an example of effective tank-barrier construction

8) Your college intern mistakenly thinks he's in his dorm room

7) Donut and bagel wrappers are swirling around behind the server exhausts like those fall leaves you didn't rake

6) You find documents pertaining to OS/2

5) The wiring is all dust-bunny gray

4) Everyone compliments you on your suspended floor system, but you didn't install one

3) That tech you sent in there two days ago? He hasn't been seen since, though somebody did find one of his shoes under a rack

2) The server changes its own screensaver to "Dust Me!"

1) You find that one of your servers was designed by Charles Babbage

We invite you to grab your dust broom and help us sweep up the surplus of submissions for this top 11 list.

Thanks to Eric Allen, Fred Ensminger, Robert W. Foster, Greg Haverdink, Mark Jass, Peter L McCauley, Tom Obright, Tim Peters, Bradley Ross, John Tibor and Duke Walls for their submissions.



Networld+Interop Notes

Our Lori MacVittie proposes these awards following the industry's premier networking trade show.

1. Most Unique Briefing: PreCache, conducted in a Mercedes-Benz SUV on the show floor.

2. Most Talkative Cabbie: Hilton to the Hard Rock, Wednesday morning. He loves his wife, has two daughters and loves being a cabbie. He doesn't think his oldest son's girlfriend is very good for him but still hopes they get married and give him grandchildren.

3. Biggest Scam: Cabbie who drove us to the Rio Sunday night proposed "double or nothing" on the fare if we could explain Einstein's theory of parallel lines converging, assuming space is curved.

4. Best Vendor Swag: Redline Networks' 20-oz. bottle of Mountain Dew at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday after six consecutive half-hour briefings.

5. New Phrases Coined: Hilton Death March (The excruciatingly long walk from the convention center to the Hilton, complete with nonfunctioning down escalator; coined by Steven Schuchart)



Daypop Refrigerator Poetry

•In a never-ending search for meaning in the vast chaos that is the Internet, our top Network Computing minds have made a shocking discovery buried within the content automatically generated by Daypop's Top Word Bursts engine (www.daypop.com/burst), which catalogues the most popular words used on the Web. By aligning the words in order of importance and inserting select verbs and prepositions, we've discovered the following hidden message:

iTunes [and] tel aviv [know] necessity [from] felony Franken [gave] ashleigh asylum [from] ipods, Raging [and] fraudulent [like] Luxembourg [when] Freund [and] passport [seemed] cogent [as] roadmap [and] rag.

Is it a message from the late cultural icon Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg? Maybe we should have used every second word.



Find more Last Mile items and submit your entries for upcoming issues at www.nwc.com/go/lmile.html.