My first lesson in industrial networking came from plant electricians who taught me that every technical problem is really a people problem.
Into the Unknown
The pickup truck's headlights cut through the darkness at 5:30 AM, and it was 0°F outside. Daniel McNeil was right on time, and I'm sure I looked scared to death climbing into that cab. It wouldn't be daylight for another four and a half hours, and I was wearing what Alabama considers Canadian winter wear... somehow both too much and not enough at the same time. The new steel toe boots felt clunky and foreign on my feet.
Dan was an engineer, very nice, and he spent the ride explaining the radio-controlled road and other details about life at a northern BC mine. I remember being particularly struck by how bright the snow was once the sun started coming up, how strange it all seemed to me, and how everybody else was just going about their day like it was nothing. The trees were different species. The birds and insects were too. They all smelled different. The snow had a silencing effect I'd never experienced before. This was Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, December 2012, and the geography was so much more extreme than anything I'd known.
I'd seen the mine before on a tour, but I remember watching the sun come up from the 4th floor office they gave me above the warehouse where they stored old manuals and safety gear. Looking out at the mountains and railroad tracks, I felt so lonely and far away from home and excited and pumped at the same time. I didn't even feel the cold, and the darkness made it all seem so weird.
My first assignment was to track down a rogue DHCP server that had been causing network problems.
The Problem
Phones wouldn't connect to the Cisco CME/CUE, systems were getting wrong IP addresses, and something was quietly subverting the infrastructure I thought I understood.
I fired up Wireshark for the first time in my life, tracking digital footprints until I found the source: a Netgear router with default credentials, broadcasting from somewhere in plant territory.
Taking my BlackBerry as a signal tracker, I crossed from mining office into plant building country. The territorial boundaries were real: different tribes, different loyalties. The flickering plant lighting made everything feel unstable as people watched me hunt through their domain.
They knew what I was there for. I could hear warnings being passed in voices just quiet enough that I couldn't make out the words.
Following signal strength to someone's workspace, I found Blaine Stokes, who knew exactly why I'd come. Hidden in his desk drawer was the culprit: a simple black router the plant electricians had installed to get internet on their phones during lunch breaks.
The Mistake
Here's where I messed up. Instead of understanding what I was really looking at -- human solution to a human problem -- I saw only a policy violation to be corrected.
I acted stern, authoritative. I confiscated their router.
The plant folks were disappointed rather than angry, like people who'd hoped the new IT guy might understand their needs but were learning otherwise. They'd expected better from someone who was supposed to help them.
The router was gone for exactly one day.
The Education
When I came in the next morning, the network was corrupted again. Same DHCP offers, same chaos, but the signals were different: stronger, better hidden, more sophisticated.
I was humiliated and outmatched. These weren't just plant workers, they were digital engineers who could outmaneuver me with technology I thought I controlled.
When I went back to Blaine, he showed me the original router still sitting dead in the drawer. "Didn't put a new one in," he said, smiling.
When I finally found their new installation, I understood I'd been fundamentally wrong about who was in control here.
They had removed another router's circuit board from its case, drilled mounting holes into the underside of a lunch table, and embedded the electronics directly into the furniture. The antennas ran out the back, invisible unless you knew exactly where to look.
This wasn't random rebellion. This was precision engineering. They hadn't just replaced the rogue network, they had improved it, made it invisible, turned it into something that operated beyond my understanding.
But in the industrial wilderness of northern BC, the Riverman was about to learn he wasn't master of anything.
The Solution
When Blaine showed me their hidden masterpiece, I started laughing, not because it was funny, but because respect was the only rational response to being so completely outplayed.
Instead of trying to destroy their work again, I asked why they needed it. The reasons were good: practical, human, reasonable. I told them I didn't mind them having internet access during breaks... I just needed it configured so it wouldn't interfere with the network that kept people safe.
I reconfigured their hidden router to work within the larger network instead of against it. Then I went to the plant manager and explained how unofficial networks could bring down critical systems, how official support was safer than guerrilla engineering.
The plant manager agreed. The electricians got their official access point.
And I quietly removed content filtering across the entire facility, because I'd learned that fighting people's fundamental need to connect was a losing battle.
The Real Lesson
That experience set the stage for the rest of my decade up north, and for everything the Riverman would learn about making networks serve the people who depend on them.
The core philosophy I've developed is simple: IT exists to serve the people who use it, not the other way around. That means understanding what people actually need to do their jobs effectively, removing barriers instead of creating them, and building systems that work with human nature rather than against it.
Networks exist to help people do their jobs. If you're fighting the people, you're doing it wrong.
It would guide the Riverman through many years of industrial networking across some of the most challenging environments on earth, but it all started with plant electricians who taught me that every network "problem" is really a people problem.
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