Flashes of Panic

Who knew that Cat-5 ethernet cables were a perishable resource?

Every so often, I add a half-dozen or so eight-foot cables to the office supply order. The nice ones in blue with the snagless plugs. I put them in a box in the server room, marked “Ethernet Cables.” Today, I looked in and found only the fifty-foot monster we used once to go room-to-room.

We don’t add new systems to the network very often; I think I can count the new network devices since my arrival on my hands. I would expect our demand for new cables to have been pretty small—less than a dozen, perhaps. I find two unoccupied six-footers in my office (which has nearly as much hardware as the server room; I count eleven PCs, though seven are stacked like cordwood in the corner, and two more are over at my “workbench” waiting for some level of attention.) But these cables aren’t of the new, snagless variety.

I can only hope they’re off together in a closet somewhere, and I will be finding little jumper-length segments of Cat-25 serendipitously in the coming months.

Now playing: Good Time from Hard Candy by Counting Crows