September 18, 2008
Help, sheesh!!!
Well, the call center has moved -- now I get to correct the installation. "No time to do the job right, lots of time to do it over." The leased building has most of the second floor fed from the ceiling area of the first floor. Mostly up into j-boxes and unto the partitions; partitions are also wired for power and thus are not easily movable, unlike the old building.
Some locations, the table pictured right, and not-against-the-wall desks in the training rooms, have monuments for power and communications. The electrical contractor did the power, correctly. The outlet is mounted in the monument, rather kick proof. However, the people who took over the job, seeing as I was, in their opinion, not capable of doing the job right, simply pulled the communications cable thru a hole and attached a surface mount jack. Note the words SURFACE MOUNT. Note that the surface mount jack is not mounted to any surface and WILL be kicked to pieces for me to repair in the future. Not that they cared -- they don't have to maintain the mess they made.
There is, of course, a better way. It even uses the same jack -- all it would have taken would have been a minute or two more AT THE TIME OF INSTALLATION. That self-same surface mount jack has holes for mounting to a standard outlet box. They like up with the screws holding the grommet plate on. It would have been trivial to have routed the cable through the back center of the jack housing and have mounted the jack firmly to the monument -- kick proof! Not to worry about having to repair kicked apart jacks.
But they didn't. So that will be one of my jobs when I get time to do it. Unfortunately it will involve removing the jacks from the cables, re-routing the cable through the back center, re-attaching the jacks, re-certifying the jacks to Cat-5, and then finally mounting the jack as it should have been done in the first place. With the number of jacks involved, a quarter hour each, about a day versus the 15 minutes total it should have taken. But then, that is 15 minutes of their time versus a day of my time. Thanks guys! But I really don't need the work, I have enough as it is.