I'm not sure if this rant goes here or in the complaint department.
I was stopped at a traffic light in front of a commercial building where one of my customers has an office. I was admiring the building when I saw what looked like a 4-pair Cat 5 coming out the side of the second floor of the building and going sort of diagonally down to the basement window, where it disappeared.
I parked and went in to see wuzzup. I had not visited them for a year or so, since everything was working fine (or so I thought) with their key system.
I went into the part of the office where I had seen the wire and there were three, single-port surface mount jacks wired to the blue, orange, and green pairs. Nothing plugged in. Hmmm. I then went down to the basement and found the other end of the wire, with three modular plugs crimped on, but not plugged into anything. Hmmm.
I go back upstairs and ask the owner wuzzup? He says that he allowed a small local non-profit to use a desk for a telephone campaign, and they elected to use Optimum Voice for the dial tones. He says that they came and installed three lines, and before he could even say "no" they had drilled right through the front of his building and draped the wire across the front and down into the basement.
What drove me to curse was the fact not that the non-profit had not called me for assistance, or that the owner had not called me, either, but that at every location in the building where there is a telephone, it's wired with 25-pair because originally they had 1A2 and all the cables are home runs to the basement, installed by me.
If you stand in the basement, all you see are 25-pair cables, all cut down neatly, and labeled as their destinations. All the jack-hole from the cable company needed to do was take a faceplate off, find all the spares he needed, and do his cross-connections in the basement, thus avoiding the "drill first, ask questions later" mode of installation. Sheeesh!
