On 1/5/2012 8:33 AM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote:
I pulled a Catalyst 2950 off the shelf that was salvaged from a job and
checked it out. I'll probably use it as a loaner on a job we just bid on
for moving a company into a temporary office trailer while mold
abatement is going on in the building. I'm going to pull one Cat5 from
the server room and move 7 work stations, 3 network printers and 7
phones. For the phones I have to pull a 25 pair Cat1 because the phones
are the freaking old Merlin system sets. They tell us they're supposed
to be getting a new IP Phone system soon. The mold abatement work will
take a couple of months and then we'll have to move them back. The 2950
is a 24 port managed switch but we only need 10 ports or a few more if
someone wants to plug in a laptop or two but I don't have to go buy one.
I've pulled a lot of 25 pair for 1A2 key systems, and for studio
phones at TV studios. The AFTRS station at Ft. Greely had severe
problems with the AM radio station getting into the phones so I added to
new Demark points in the building. One for the offices, and the other
in engineering. Then I pulled out over a mile of station wire. They
were very quiet after that. The Orlando station (Ch. 55) had a really
bad habit of using station wire to set up the phones for their
telethons, and they never used the same layout twice so there was lots
of dead wire in the lighting grid. I cleaned up the 1A2 at WLBE, and
added more phones, then repaired all but one of the existing phones.
The last Merlin system I saw had caught fire at Microdyne's Ocala plant
in 1999. They had already signed a contract for a new phone system and
they were waiting for it to be installed when it went up in flames one
Saturday morning. A lot of smoke and water damage in the executive suite
and Engineering department. You could still catch faint smoke odors a
year later.
The old Merlin is not 1A2, it's the funky electronic Merlin horror show
that Ma Bell saddled customers with. It uses 4 pair and an RJ45 plug on
the cord. I sort of liked the old 1A2 systems, they were hard to break
and you could hit a burglar over the head with the phone then call the
cops with the bloody set to come pick up the corpse. The electronic
Merlin can quit working if you hang up too hard.
The business computer actually belongs to guy who messes it up and one
of the other guys is bad about messing up anything he touches so I want
to set up a computer for them to play with. I don't let them touch my
computers. I call what they do "Drunk Computing" because they usually
foul the things up after a half dozen beers or a fifth of something that
contains a high concentration of ethanol. o_O
Pull a Dilbert and give them Etch-A-Sketches. ;-)
They sound like the VP of marketing that I worked with in Cable TV.
I told him that he was 'Mechanically Declined' in front of my boss. My
boss threw a hissy fit, but the VP told him to shut the hell up because
it was true. Then he grinned and said that 'Cincinnati is the only
system that has my equipment set up and ready to use when I arrive, I
really appreciate it!' 
The guys really don't understand computers that well so I can really
mess with their minds like when I drop a live Linux CD into the optical
drive and leave it running. ^_^
TDD