So my company is moving our DC office location. We're taking over an excellent space that used to house a startup. We were able to acquire all of their office furniture and that 's making it relatively easy to move in. New paint and carpet and then some easy fixes here and there and we're in our new home.
I'm spending a fair bit of time meeting contractors and installers in the new space. While I'm there I take care of some of the little things that aren't clearly anyone ones job (we're a pretty small part of the company) because we don't have a dedicated facilities management team. One of the things I've been doing this week is removing a lot of junk cables they left in the main conference room.
Judging by the mounting brackets and empty boxes I've seen left behind it looks like they home-brewed an A/V setup with Logitech gear. That I have no problem with. What I did find troubling is the way they did the cabling.
In this example they cut the power plug wire and have spliced about 30 feet of copper wire in and did some poor taping jobs connecting them together. They took the cameras but didn't take the power cords, which I found odd. Then they took a crapload of USB extenders to run these cameras all around the largest conference room.
I mean I get it, you have to put some USB repeater/extenders in the connection to get them to reach that far. But did you have to do this too?
So there's a power outlet near-ish where there camera was located and they powered the USB repeater with it but not the camera, that they back-hauled to the front of the room by cutting the cord and spicing.
This little gem was a beauty. It's hard to see there but the bit that's in my hand is a short C13 to C14 power cord. They took a significantly long, 10 foot or so NEMA 5-15 plug to C13 cord (the kind you'd plug into a PC power supply or monitor) and then put the C13 to C14 adapter on it and then plugged in an TV power cord. Baffling. The also have multiple places where they took lamp extension cords and chained them together to reach where they needed to get power to.
Ok so as I'm taking all this stuff out I'm getting more and more annoyed and the "duct tape and baling wire" level engineering work going on here. At some point I stopped to think, why am I so bothered by this? It's getting corrected now, why is it so maddening to me? Because it's me. This is the kind of work I've done in my past. The more I take this stuff out the more I see myself in the choices they made.
