Wow, this is a blast from the past, circa 1992-1998. For my sins I used to maintain a fairly large Thick Ethernet network for a large textile manufacturing company in the UK (working for a contractor that basically had very few clues about employee health and safety, hindsight is a wonderful thing).
A fair chunk of this network ran through their factory up in the factory roofspace. I used to climb these ridiculously high step ladders to reach up into the factory roof steelwork to install "vampire taps".
It used to scare the bejesus out of me, mostly due to an aversion to heights, the other being that the factories produced cotton thread, which during one of the processes requires the application of a fine mist of wax or light grease, I don't remember why. But every high up surface was deceivingly lubricated with a fine layer of wax or grease as a result of being kinetically atomised into the air by high speed thread spinners, rollers, spoolers and guides. To further focus your mind, there was also an opportunity of being impaled on these massive crane lifted pointy multi-spool holder things should you put a foot wrong (they were used to lift large bulk spools of rough spun cotton into even larger dying machines).
Although we had a proper coring tool my biggest fear was of creating a short between the shield and core and unf*cking that up a 30 ft step ladder in that environment would have ruined my day (we had to install these things on live segments, there was no downtime permitted). Fortunately the quality and accuracy of the tooling was good, the customer used the correct cable (not some cheap imitation) and my karma and anxiety levels could return to normal once the transceiver lights flickered into life.
Just thought I'd share my lasting memory and experience of 10BASE5 hands on work.
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Wow, this is a blast from the past, circa 1992-1998. For my sins I used to maintain a fairly large Thick Ethernet network for a large textile manufacturing company in the UK (working for a contractor that basically had very few clues about employee health and safety, hindsight is a wonderful thing).
A fair chunk of this network ran through their factory up in the factory roofspace. I used to climb these ridiculously high step ladders to reach up into the factory roof steelwork to install "vampire taps".
It used to scare the bejesus out of me, mostly due to an aversion to heights, the other being that the factories produced cotton thread, which during one of the processes requires the application of a fine mist of wax or light grease, I don't remember why. But every high up surface was deceivingly lubricated with a fine layer of wax or grease as a result of being kinetically atomised into the air by high speed thread spinners, rollers, spoolers and guides. To further focus your mind, there was also an opportunity of being impaled on these massive crane lifted pointy multi-spool holder things should you put a foot wrong (they were used to lift large bulk spools of rough spun cotton into even larger dying machines).
Although we had a proper coring tool my biggest fear was of creating a short between the shield and core and unf*cking that up a 30 ft step ladder in that environment would have ruined my day (we had to install these things on live segments, there was no downtime permitted). Fortunately the quality and accuracy of the tooling was good, the customer used the correct cable (not some cheap imitation) and my karma and anxiety levels could return to normal once the transceiver lights flickered into life.
Just thought I'd share my lasting memory and experience of 10BASE5 hands on work.