Most of you know what I do in my current job. I run cables and have the title of Network Manager. Though I have an idea of what this entails, I find that I prefer the cable side of the house due to its solitary nature and tedious work. I find my quiet time amongst the tangle of wires and hum of switches.
In an attempt to explain to the rest of you what I do at work I have put together a pictorial of a particular job that my co-worker Tom and I ran in an evening.
So it begins here.
The job starts at the switch itself. We first identify the short cables that are the reasons why we cannot move the switch to a shelf. There is no give on this side and so we expect there will be some extra cable length on the user's side. After each cable is clearly identified as being too short, we open up the floor just outside the switch location and begin the tedious process of tracing the cables to their perspective user connections. We "twitch" or wiggle each line from the switch side so we can find them under the floor and figure out which way they run in the floor troughs. Sometimes the cable runs are easy. In other cases they are difficult to locate and messy to pull.
Once we have a general idea of where we are going, we end up at the computers where we continue to twitch and pull on the lines. When they are found, we can eventually pull the excess line from the computer side to the switch side.
There are a lot of floor tiles to be pulled up and depending on when and where we pull cables, we may have a handful of these floor tiles pulled and set aside on the floor we are working. The tiles are made of steel and are very heavy, to say the least. Another factor in deciding to the pull the floor up is in the main carpeted areas. There is this robot mail cart that circles the floor every 30 minutes and runs on a magnetic tape or sprayed "track" along the carpeting. Place a carpet square in the wrong direction or wrong place and the mail cart doesn't know what to do or where to go. I think I relayed the story one time in which I was in a main hallway and along came the mail cart. After I figured out how to stop it and replaced the carpet tiles, it refused to go. It eventually was pulled back onto the track by hand and sent on its way. I hated that thing and they still give me chills when I hear one while working in the floors.
Another factor in this are the people waling around. So for safety sake we have to put out these little yellow men which I think are really not cool looking. I find them silly, but then they get the job done.
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