why... WHY do I always attract all sorts of weird problems...

I feel like it makes me look incompetent :/

Like this side-gig. I had a client who brought us essentially half a rack (20 blade servers, 7 units of network equipment) and asked us to spin it up. No passwords, no topology - nothing. It was my first such "project".

So I'm setting it all up, using chatgpt and notions of vlan theory from college years ago. I managed to make smth work. Went away for the rest of the day. Hours later I come back -- no longer can connect to ovpn running on a MikroTik router. wtf... connect to office router's vpn, winbox via mac to the router to see wtf. Everything seems alright, except when I try to `/ip route print` it just hangs there. Tried a few times. -- same result. As if routes just got borked while noone was touching it. Found someone who's working with networks wtf, he said he's NEVER seen this happening. A router reboot sorted this out. That's weird problem #1.

I finished reverse-engineering and re-setting up the networking, sketched a topology with patching scheme and asked colleagues to take it all to the DC. They did it, connected it all up. 5 nodes aren't accessible via network. So I connect remotely to the router's openvpn and try to see what's up. Indeed, some servers are reachable, others aren't; even though MT switch (router's downlink) sees those servers plugged in with link up, servers don't see the link. I noticed some ports aren't trunking some VLANs. I started adding those ports when the winbox connection dropped out of the blue. 5-4-3-2-1-reconnecting... it reconnected. Yayy!! But wait, where is everything...? All interfaces -- gone (physical ones too). All IPs -- gone. All routes -- gone. Everything's gone. Half a minute later I'm disconnected again. The switch IP is no longer pingable. Servers plugged into it aren't reachable either. That's weird problem #2.

Then I figured I might try to see whether I can see anything from the router level. Try to ssh to it -- attempt was dropped, as if 22/tcp was closed. wtf? It was working in the office. winbox into it -- yayy, that works. Try to open a terminal via winbox -- a dialog pops up "Terminal <1> - not permitted (9)". wtf..? I Google this error up, it says that user is a member of group that does not have telnet and ssh permission. Indeed, I loog into groups -- the group 'admin' does not have them. Try to add them -- also not permitted. And I'm the 'admin' user, a single user in the router after a factory reset. How the hell else do I change permissions if even admin is flipped a finger.
That's weird problem #3

And now I look like an incompetent prick with two left hands who is only breaking shit.
And it's been like that my whole career

Why... How... ffs, that's getting annoying. Maybe I should downgrade myself to a QA. Problems find me themselves, I don't even have to look for them