Alright, let me tell you about this one time, this… thing. We all had a name for it, not a polite one, mind you. The guys on the floor, we just started calling it the “VLP” for short around the higher-ups, but amongst ourselves, yeah, it was the “very long penis.” Not because of anything dirty, really, but because it was just obscenely long, a total pain in the backside, and it felt like it was deliberately trying to screw us over every single day.
So, what was it? It was this massive run of specialized cabling we had to install in the old North Wing. Sounds simple, right? Just pull some cable. Hah! This wasn’t your average Cat6. This stuff was thick as your thumb, stiff as a board, and had to be laid out in one continuous, ungodly length. Over three hundred meters of it. Through ancient conduits, around obstacles that weren’t on any blueprint, and with a bend radius that meant you needed about ten feet of clearance for any turn.
The Beginning of the Nightmare
I remember the day the spools arrived. Two of them, looking like something you’d use to moor a battleship. My boss, bless his clueless heart, just pointed and said, “Get that from Point A to Point B by Friday.” Point A was the main server room. Point B was this tiny closet in the furthest, dustiest corner of the North Wing, a place forgotten by God and architects alike.
First, we tried the direct route. That lasted about two hours until we hit a solid concrete beam that wasn’t on any of the 50-year-old plans. So, we had to reroute. This meant going up, over, through ceiling spaces barely big enough for a malnourished rat. We were sweating, cursing, covered in dust and who-knows-what-else. Every pull was a battle. The cable would snag on everything. A stray pipe, a forgotten nail, the ghost of a long-dead maintenance guy, probably.
Days of Struggle
We built makeshift pullies, used more lubricant than a… well, never mind. We had three guys pulling, one guiding, and one just standing by with a pry bar and a look of utter despair. That was usually me. There were moments we thought we’d have to cut the damn thing, but no, the specs said “one continuous length for signal integrity.” Integrity my foot, it was testing the integrity of my sanity.
- We ripped two pairs of gloves each.
- Young Jimmy nearly took his eye out when the cable slipped and whipped back.
- I definitely invented at least three new curse words.
The worst part was the “mid-point sag.” Because it was so long and heavy, getting it through the overhead sections without it kinking or stretching under its own weight was a genuine engineering problem we were solving with brute force and desperation. We looked like a bunch of grunts trying to wrestle an anaconda that had swallowed a lamppost.
Finally, the End in Sight (Sort Of)
After four days – not the “by Friday” the boss wanted, more like “by the time we all quit” – we finally saw the closet. That last ten meters, you’d think it would be easy. Nope. The doorway was too narrow. We had to take the damn door off its hinges. Then, unspooling the final bit and trying to coil the excess neatly (ha!) in a space the size of a phone booth nearly broke us. It wasn’t neat. It was a pile of defiance.
When we finally plugged it in, and the light blinked green on the tester, there wasn’t even a cheer. Just silence. We were too broken. We just packed up, caked in filth, and went to the nearest bar. Nobody said much. We just drank. That cable, that “very long penis,” had taken a piece of our souls.
So yeah, that was my practical experience with that particular beast. It got done. It worked. But if anyone ever asks me to do something like that again, I’m walking. Some things are just too damn long and frustrating to be worth the paycheck. You learn that the hard way.
