VGOM Adventure 3: Battle of the Hubs — Johnson & Johnson Smackdown!

dougkreitz8
May 14
2 min read

Starring: VGOM vs. Engineer Al

Tampa, Florida — Circa the Age of 10BaseT

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Somewhere deep in the bowels of a Johnson & Johnson facility…

The fluorescent lights flickered. The scent of solder, stress, and stale coffee filled the air. Two contenders entered the arena—each armed with nothing but 10BaseT Ethernet hubs and enough ego to overload a network segment.

On one side: Engineer Al, champion of Synoptics. Polished. Confident. Sporting a lab coat pressed so crisp it could cut fiber.

On the other: VGOM, our hero. Cloaked in experience, draped in sarcasm, and wielding the power of Cabletron Systems like a blessed artifact from the tech gods of yore.

This was no ordinary sales pitch. This was a product shootout, and the stakes?

Nothing less than standardization supremacy—first for the J&J Tampa facility, then potentially for the entire continental United States.

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Weeks of Lab Testing. Dozens of Diagrams. So Many Donuts.

The pre-game was brutal. Benchmarks were run. Tech specs were debated. Acronyms flew like ninja stars. But the true test came in a head-to-head showdown, with the customer watching, popcorn metaphorically in hand.

Al went first.

He dazzled with graphs. Wooed with firmware revisions. Even made a joke about TCP/IP—crickets, but effort counts.

Then VGOM stepped forward.

Hair tousled just right. Cape gleaming. He pumped errored packets straight into both hubs like a caffeinated QA tester gone rogue.

First stop: Cabletron MMAC hub.

VGOM yanked the management module mid-stream like a magician revealing a rabbit. The room gasped. But wait—

The port blocking the bad packets? Still blocking.

The good traffic? Still flowing.

No flames. No explosions. Just sweet, uninterrupted throughput.

Then, with all eyes on him, VGOM reached for the Synoptics hub.

Engineer Al paled.

“DON’T DO THAT!” he shrieked—