Cable, cable, cable.

So against all better logic T-Rav and I are in the midst of an enormous cabling job.  We’re running 4 to 6 Cat 5e cables at 11 to 13 different retail locations in the twin cities.

I’ve honestly never done a large scale cabling job before.  I’ve done plenty of one offs and such, starting with some basic runs when Lundo and I shared an apartment in the early 90′s.  So this is a learning experience.

Lesson #1 : Never trust the estimate given by the buyer.  They estimated 50ft runs.  So I budgeted for that.  Nope, way off.  All the runs have been at least 80ft and up to as much as 110ft.  This isn’t a really big deal, except all the runs have to be a very specific color, and need to be run with Plenum cable (which locally runs $300 for 100ft. if anyone locally carried the right color, which they don’t).

Lesson #2 : It’s a two person job.  It goes much much faster with two people.  T-Rav’s solo gig this morning took almost 5 hours.  The afternoon gig we did together took around 2 hours.

All that said, it’s actually kinda fun.  You get ignored by the employees pretty much, and if you strip down to a t-shirt, nobody cares.  I don’t think I’ve worn a T-shirt at a job site since 1999.  I got absolutely filthy this afternoon crawling around in an ancient warehouse space, running cables around all sorts of old pipes and such.  Loved it.  Nice break from fixing stupid Windows Vista issues.

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