My CCIE rack and some company in DC

Over the past few weeks things have been chaotic for me. New job, and other personal endeavors have taken up most of my time (I'm about to get engaged). I just had to post this last encounter as it was too odd. Earlier this week I got a call around 4:45 pm about a network that keeps going down. We had some systems people in there working on Exchange, citrix and netapp. They had been rebooting their switches and the network would come back up and the switches would go haywire again. Anyways it gets so bad that someone had to go. I figured it was on my way home and I'll just unplug some cables break the loop and get back to normal life. Well 7 hours later I was still there with no resolution. First off we didn't have management to the switches and they just appeared to have some weird behaviors. So I'm getting hell from the switches, the owner of the company, and my girlfriend so how do we solve this problem. Back at the job there were no switches that met the needs of the customer, but wait...I have a couple of switches in my rack back home. I spoke about the switches I had and management agreed to put them in place the next day. Came home saved my configs from them, erased them, and got them ready. Plugged them in and the network is pumping out packets like a champ. What have we learned from this? Site surveys mean everything, make sure you have access to the entire environment your about to change.