Entries this day: twenty_cables

twenty cables

7:53am Tuesday 23 March 1999

Yesterday Dude and I did some contract work for a telecommunications company. The job entails pulling about 160 cables into a construction site. ("pulling cables" means installing the phone and computer cables (wires) that connect the phones and computers on the desks in the office to the main phone and computer switches.)

This particular job is the biggest of this type that we've done; it's a lotta work, but we couldn't pass up the price: $25 per cable, and we don't have to actually punch down the cables on each end. ("punch down" means connect it to the pretty plate on the wall so a computer can just plug into the socket)

Cool. So anyway, yesterday we started pulling the longest run first: 10 voice and 10 data cables from the telecomm room to the other end of the building. We pulled the 10 voice, labled each end and terminated them at the telecomm room ("terminate" means cut the cable from the box out of which we pulled it), then almost finished pulling the 10 data when an older man and younger woman walked through the site.

I thought nothin' of it, but Dude heard the conversation that occured in the telecomm room when they came through there.

Just finished pulling the 10 data and was about to go terminate them when our contact came in. "Dude and Rob, we've got big changes."

Turns out the man is the Senior Director of the Board (or something), founder of the company (or something), and something else (or something), and he wanted that room which had been designated as the telecomm room to be his office.

Actually, the telecomm room was one half of that which he wanted to be his office. Let me draw a picture.

----------------------------------
|               X                |
|               X                |
|  telecomm     X     something  |
|               X                |
|    room               else     |
|                                |
----------------------------    --

XXXX = a new wall that had been installed into the whole room that he wanted to be his office.

Part of the reason he wanted the room, apparently, was for the wooden floor. Let me tell you clearly: that floor was messed up from all the construction. First, there was mud and cement dried to it. Then there was wall plaster dried to it. And there was a wall riveted across its center.

Cabling halted, they called our boss, we told our boss how much we had done and that one possible new location would be no problem for us to move to, and the other would require us to totally start over.

Now it's 8:16am and (we're a tad late) we're going back to see what is the verdict.

And unfortunately now that I think about it, the "easy" location will not be as easy as I had hoped. We'll see. permalink