Not So Famous…

MySpace is great…MySpace is wonderful…MySpace will get rid of excess body hair.

You know what?  MySpace just freakin’ crashed my browser 4 times, and is slower than Charlie Gordon reading freakin’ War and Peace.  MySpace is a poorly-designed piece of junk.

Too bad everyone decided it was amazingly, whooptasticly awesome instead of the other social networking sites that are far more stable.

Earlier this week, I decided that I needed to stay late at work to do some work that would require the network in the office and the servers to be down for an extended period of time. I invited my friend, Gabe, over to help me out and keep me company.  How did it go?  IT SUCKED!  Everything that could have gone wrong DID go wrong.  Here’s what happened…

To begin with, I was going to blow the dust out of the servers.  They collect dust, and when they end up with enough dust in them, they run too hot.  When they run hot, they run the risk of overheating and blowing up.  Blowing servers up = bad.  However, the side panel of our server rack was locked, so I couldn’t really get to the back of the servers to unplug or plug them back in.  I didn’t have the key, and I couldn’t find it.  So much for that idea.

I also needed to trace and label the jacks in the office.  It’s very difficult to do IT work when you don’t know what ports at the main switch go to what jacks in the offices.  Tracing these lines is normally a very simple activity.  I have a brand new line toner that sends a tone down the line, where you can put a receiver to find out where the tone is coming from.  That wasn’t working.

So I decide to use a cable-tester instead of the toner.  The first jack I tried gave me some errors…wires 4 and 5 weren’t working.  When I looked closely at the termination of the wires, the guy who put this jack in managed to nearly cut through wires 4, 5, 7, and 8, which fully broke when I plugged the tester into the jack.  Nice, eh?

So I try re-terminating these wires, but I don’t have the tool necessary to do this job. (Punch-Down Tool)  So I decide to try and use my bare fingers.  Didn’t work. Next I try grabbing the wire with pliers and forcing it down.  Didn’t work. So I grab my trusty pocket-knife to force the little blades apart enough to get the wires down in there.  Didn’t work.  Finally, I decide the best solution is to grab an exact-o knife to force the little blades apart.  This not only didn’t work, but resulted in me stabbing my thumb really deep.

I tested the rest of the lines, and I think they all worked fine.  The important thing for everyone to learn is that a punch-down block or jack requires a punch-down tool, and while you MIGHT be able to jimmy the wires into the punch without the tool, it could easily result in a nasty injury.  :)

It sure made Gabe laugh a lot, though.  He loves when I injure myself.