On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I assisted one of our maintenance staff with running twelve wires around the building. We made two runs, each with six cables (four network and two coax). Running six cables at a time through dropped ceilings in an old building (mostly, some parts were in the new building) takes a lot more work that you’d think at first glance. One of the runs was about 250 feet, and the other was probably a bit less but I haven’t checked for sure.

It does go a lot faster with two people; one person would likely take several days to make one of these runs! We set up a makeshift spindle to allow the cable to somewhat easily unwind as we pulled it through the ceiling; I’ve provided a picture I snapped to show our (somewhat ingenious, if I do say so myself) cable pulling setup! The second run, with the setup shown in the picture, actually splits halfway through and three of the lines go one way (to our children’s auditorium) and the other three continue on to the office of our Facilities Manager (technically, Facilities Director, but then I can’t say FMer :-) (If you don’t get that, you had to be at the Roundtable at CoR in October!) Being this active for two days took a bit of a toll on my legs, but my eyes relished the break from the oft-near computer screens!