Sometimes even the most seasoned IT guy makes mistakes. Silly ones. I have been in IT since the year 1999. 18 years this year. My fist real calamity was Y2k, which turned out to be a non-issue… mostly. More hype and triple checking of systems that never had problems. But I never underestimate my ability to make simple mistakes.

Anyway, in my tenure as an IT guy, I have run the gamut of responsibilities. Network admin, exchange admin, cable monkey, hardware technician, script kitty… I am blessed to have a job where I am not shoehorned into a specific role, but get to dirty my hands in all sorts of different things. I’m like the Swiss Army man of IT. Which basically means I know a little bit about a lot of things.

Cabling, however, is something I happen to excel at. I’m that guy that “makes cables pretty”. So when the company decided to move our server room across the building, I jumped at the opportunity. We’re doing to move in stages to minimize downtime, and stage one is to transition the servers to the new location and leave all network and security at the current location acting as a makeshift IDF. Later, the building will have all new drops and the rest of the equipment will be moved to the new location.

So to stage the servers and patch back to the “IDF”, a small bundle of CAT6 was run and patched at both ends. At one end, the server room as a shelf on a cabinet, and it made a great place to sit and punch down the patch panel. But with 16 feet of cabling hanging out of the ceiling, it kept pulling itself off the table, so genius me ran one cable through the shelf pin hole and with a little Velcro the whole thing stayed put.

But I forgot to pull that cable out and punch it last. The result is the picture above. The hole was also, to my chagrin, too small to fit the RJ-45 through.
So did I cut the zip-ties , disconnect the terminal and re-punch the block. No. I took a hacksaw to that shelf like a champ. Now wait, it’s not like I cut off the whole leg, I just made a cut, bent the hole, pulled the cable out and bent it back.

I am not going to hear the end of this from my colleagues.