Speedcabling

Here’s a fun sport to try out: Speedcabling.

The idea is that you try to untangle a jumbled up mix of computer wires, and do this against the clock.  The first competition of this kind has been held in Los Angles, the article reports.

It’s the sort of thing that I often do for my customers – labelling all the cables and them removing them all, only to replace them with a much neater arrangement, preferably using new, colour-coded cables.

But once I remember doing this in the server room of a company with about 50 employees.  I spent an entire Saturday morning re-wiring all the patch fields to make the system more presentable and understandable.

Another time I had to remove old network cable out of the ducts in the wall, and back then this was so-called BNC-cabling, where everything was joined to one big circuit – not like the structured cabling used today.

Again, I spent several hours trying to rescue as much cable as possible to be able to re-use it later.  But sometimes there was not other way than to cut through it, especially where the plugs had been attached after the cable had been put through specially-made holes in the wall.

So how would I fare in a speedcabling challenge?  I think I’d be pretty good.  When the sport makes it Europe, maybe I’ll have a got!