I’ll Bet Their Hair Looks Fabulous

Back when I was in high school, I got a part-time job working as a data center technician for one of the companies at a colocation. Mostly, I was doing various small tasks in maintaining lots of servers, as well as some basic office work — organizing old drawers, labeling stuff, etc.

But one of the first tasks I was given was making new Cat5e patch cables for a particular server rack that was in dire need of reorganizing. Now, when I first saw this rack, I hadn’t really seen what one of those is supposed to look like, but I knew that what I saw wasn’t it.

They had something like twenty patch cables connecting these servers together, except someone had decided to use fifteen-foot cables instead of the one- to three-foot ones that were actually needed.

So, there were just lengths of cable dangling all over this rack. Even worse, whoever did this chose to organize the cables by literally braiding them together. They could have used zip ties or something specifically for that purpose, but no, they used the cables themselves. There were at least five thick braids of twisted-up cable hanging off of these servers.

It was like someone had heard about braided cables — what the inside of a single ethernet cable can look like — and decided to just make ethernet cable rope because it would look nicer. And it was my job to fix this mess.

Anyway, I ended up replacing all of these with much shorter cables, but unfortunately, the old cables were permanently twisted and I’m not sure if they ever ended up using them for anything after that. I also later learned that these were the company’s own servers, much unlike the pristine racks they kept for their clients.