Fifty Feet of Doom

Yesterday was the great office switch. I got to move into my new window-laden digs while a couple of students had to move into my old office.

We had started to prepare for the move on Wednesday night. We cleaned out all of our desks, unplugged all our computers, wiped all the surfaces down, etc. I had a meeting scheduled for early the next morning so I got to delegate all the heavy lifting to my minion. I instructed him to be sure and vacuum the room as he moved out, after all who would want to move into a nasty office?

When I arrived at my new office yesterday morning I found my minion furiously cleaning. The students who vacated our new office did not feel compelled to leave it in the same state of cleanliness as we had left ours. To be fair to the students, it wasn’t just them. They were but the most recent inhabitants of my new office. From inspection it appears clear that no person for the last decade had taken it upon themselves to clean the room.

We spent the better part of the day cleaning and organizing. We created many a nasty-black paper towels and vacuum crannies which had been collecting debris for who know how long. We discovered that the windows were locked open. From the rust we assume that the windows had been swung open about an inch for a couple of years. With a little hard work, a pair of pliers, and someone pushing from the outside we were able to get the window closed.

I was in my new office for all of about 3 hours before I managed to piss off a university vice president.

The room currently has four network drops, two on each side of the office. We really need four on one side of the office. So I decided the easiest thing to do would be to buy a couple of 50’ network cables and run them up one wall, over the ceiling, and down the other. There are already cable conduits that run up and down the walls so we could just stick the cables in those and the job would be very clean. The mistake we made is not closing our door before starting to run the cables.

Evidently we have a vice president who is in charge of networking. He happened to be walking by my office when he saw us playing with his precious network conduits. He griefed me for awhile - actually he was pretty darn condescending. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I had dressed down for the move and looked like a normal student; I hadn’t realized that my cufflinks were the secret to people respecting me around this place.

He, in turn, sent in one of his minions to further check up on us. We explained what we were doing. He told us it was dangerous to hook a 50’ network cable up to the network. Evidently that is an extraordinarily long cable and networks aren’t meant to handle it. I find it to be wholly remarkable that our building is more than fifty feet long and all the rooms seem to have network connectivity. He also exhibited trepidation that we were just planning on throwing the cables over the ceiling tiles… evidently our roof is a mere few ounces away from crushing all of us.

They also decided to tattle on us to our center director. I had already alerted him that I was causing a horrible network crisis. He assured them that he’d take care of the matter. He later came into my office and reprimanded me for “taking initiative, saving the center time, money, and inter departmental work orders.” He pointed out with that sort of behavior I was likely to accidentally accomplish work and be productive. He also pointed out that he was taking Friday off and asked if I could try and make it through the day without distressing any more university vice presidents.