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strong ethernet cables
Friday, March 28 2008
I was up early to get into the New York State Correctional Facility in Woodbourne by 9AM. Woodbourne is in Sullivan County in the southern Catskills (16 miles northeast of Yasgur's Farm), about an hour's drive southwest from Hurley.
As has recently been the case for these in-prison jobs, I was assigned a guy who sat around doing nothing (not even reading books) while I did the work. For some reason today I was assigned two such guys, one of whom had been selected (and brought in to work overtime) because he knew somewhat more than average about computer hardware. Today's job mostly involved the installation of a server and a huge network switch and the stringing of cables from that switch to all computers on the network. Eventually the network will come to resemble a mini one-room version of the internet, but all I managed to accomplish today was getting all the workstations so they could print to one printer (which lives out its miserable existence in a small steel cage).
At one point one of the pooh-bahs came by and grumbled about the ethernet cables being "strong," as if I was supposed to know what he meant by that. It turned out he was concerned that a prisoner might fashion a few of them into an escape rope. I'd already zip-tied the cables into place, but now my assigned guards seemed to think that at some point down the road I'd have to come back and install all those cables in steel conduit.
When I work in the prisons, I never take bathroom breaks or eat any sort of food, so by the time I emerge I'm always both bursting at the seams and famished. My drive home was fueled by two enormous slices of pizza from a pizzeria at the north end of Ellenville and one of those newfangled energy drinks, the kind that taste repulsive and are colored with seemingly-radioactive dyes.
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