motorfirebox

I've spent the past week trying to fix the phone wiring in this office building that serves a hydrofracking company. Note that phone wiring is not really a thing I have any training in. The place has two separate phone demarcs, for some reason, and the wiring infrastructure is split between them. Half the phone jacks are hidden behind heavy, cheap furniture, so I can't fit my tone generator in there to track jacks back to the punchdown blocks--the desks and bookshelves will collapse if an attempt is made to move them, I've discovered. Some kind of defensive mechanism, I don't know. I've had to resort to popping wires out of the punchdown block and seeing which phones go dead. I, partly because I am totally cool and partly because this is the kind of thing a tech is supposed to fucking do, have been marking each jack as I locate its spot on the punchdown block. The order is completely random--there's a set of jacks on one wall, in particular, that are actually split between two different lines. I mean, why? There are four pairs per line, and rather than using all four from one line, they use two pairs from two! Why?

I thought I was finished, yesterday, but I have to go back out tomorrow because one of the phones doesn't conform to the setup it's supposed to have--the setup that I was never actually given, and which I have never actually seen written down anywhere. It is an oral tradition, passed with great ceremony from the elder secretary to the younger, just before the tribe ritually kills and eats the retiring matron. I feel I have come very close to true acceptance by these primitive but noble Drillers in the Sticks.