Fun on Site

Some of Our Favourite "Challenges" in removing equipment. Hopefully this will give you an insight into how we work. You may even grin.

• Entrance doors and lifts reduced in size following installation of large used phone equipment, effectively trapping it inside the comms. Room. (Oh dear!)
• "Creative cabling" mixing live unmarked cables with dead ones, and making them indistinguishable. Care required! By the Grace of God, our record is good.
• "Horror at the Spaghetti House". Lifting raised floors often provokes a sharp intake of breath. We cannot believe some comms infrastructure can survive with such chaotic "structured cabling" in comms rooms. (Structure? What structure?) The smartest and biggest organisations often have the worst cabling. And, from underneath this mess, we need to remove redundant cables. (Help! Bring on the trained rodents!)
• One department of an organisation fighting with another department about who should isolate a domestic-type three-amp socket, which held up removal of three tonnes of used phone equipment. Common, maybe, but this fight, staged at major multinationals offices, lasted for six months.
• Investigations of one piece of used phone equipment revealing 60 ISDN channels, which had been in place for three years. Not surprising, except that they had never ever carried traffic. Ever. And had cost the company over £4000 in rental.
• One senior corporate telecommunications manager's method of tracing live circuits (leading to a used phone system) was as follows; - switch devices off and cut cables, and then see who comes knocking. (Yes, really.)
• Text menace. Students at a university campus walking with their heads in their mobile phones and having to be warned not to walk into equipment. Trivial? Nope! This slowed work down by 50%, as we needed to post "lookouts" in certain areas to fend off the "heads down" students.
• Copious loose change found under old cabinets at almost every site. A certain major brand of sweet (we find "allsorts") found in quantity under a fifteen year old system, still as unmarked as the day they were made. We didn't try any.
• A classic BT engineer's screwdriver dating from 1983 found under a large used phone system. It's beautiful. We should frame it.