This is a job for a 13-year old

Some cabling guys came around to the apartment today to finish off the install of the new phone line. I knew they were coming so I wasn't surprised when my server suddenly showed as down on my monitoring program at work. When it failed to reappear an hour later I knew there was something wrong.

All these guys had to do was hook up a cable that had already been laid between the demarcation point and the existing outlet in the kitchen. There are outlets in every room of the apartment, and they are all connected so simply connecting the new line to one of the old outlets would have made everything life. Elaine made a point of telling them that there were other jacks - not the least important of which is the one my computer is connected to - and to just hook up to the existing wiring.

Apparently there was some kind of language barrier and these "professionals" attached the wire to the old jack in the kitchen and cut the lead to all the other jacks.

I came home at lunch and reconnected the quad wire leading to the other jacks so that the computers would be on-line again. Fortunately there was just enough slack left in the wire they cut to make to the posts again. While I was at it I noticed that they had only bothered to connect pair-1. This whole exercise was done to bring three pairs of copper into all the apartments - four for a standard 2-line phone wiring and the third for future use. I told the superintendents about this and when I got home looked up the standard for Cat-5 to Quad pairings (white/blue to green, blue/white to red - at least they got that right) and connected the correct pair from the Cat-5 bundle to the old Quad wiring.

In the 8th grade I took Industrial Education along with most of the other boys (and a handful of girls - we had the option to take either Industrial Education of Home Economics and the division was pretty much along gender lines, but not officially so). In the 8th grade electricity segment of Industrial Education we learned basic wiring and built a working telephone from scratch. This is not rocket science. This was not a programme that only the geeks went through. This was a programme designed for rural kids whose ambition was to work in the pulp mill. The idiots that came around today would have failed.

Competence is the new excellence. All one need do to be extraordinary is to simply not fuck up royally.