It’s been a slow process catching up with my life. There’s a lot of stuff going on at work and my pace varies depending on what I’m working on… there’s a lot of high-level engineering and planning that goes on in what I do, and I spend a lot of time carefully building and adjusting systems that have no face to them, and are merely the bedrock of other systems. It’s slow work, and I’ll feel like I’m barely making any headway on a problem when suddenly all or enough of these little components will be done and I’ll be able to quickly plough through an entire feature and redeem myself for another week.
It’s tax season, and I cut a cheque to the IRS for the first time ever. That stung a little, but I am glad to be fortunate enough to be in a position where I owe the money.
The noise from the construction on my condo has been wearing me down. They begin quite literally at the crack of 7 A.M., which simply doesn’t jive with my sleep cycle. After pressing the construction manager I finally got them to send their cable installation guy to my unit in order to reroute my existing cable line behind the wall, which was basically the trigger event I was waiting for before attacking my project of running additional cables throughout my condo. I knew there wasn’t much hope in trying to get him to do the entire project for me, but it was a good opportunity to learn what to expect when I went to do it myself. My plan was to run all of the cables through the crawl space beneath my building. Once I’d found out where the entrance was I scoped it out and did some reconnaissance – just a little bit – it looked pretty intimidating, with detached insulation hanging everywhere and tight cement bulkheads that would make it very difficult to get around. Possibly the worst part was that there are about six condos per floor of my building and the entrance was in a storage unit on the opposite side, and the underground was a complete maze that was going to be nearly impossible for me to navigate.
As it turns out, even just drilling down into the crawl space is fraught with complications. But the biggest discouragement came when his partner came back up and told us of his experience down there… “hell on earth”, crawling in the dark on gravel amongst dead rats and mounds of their feces, and putrid water that had been standing for heaven knows how many years.
I very nearly abandoned my plan… I’m not entirely faint of heart but it just sounded like too much; I’m creeped out enough by rats when they’re alive, and I wasn’t exactly Andy Dufresne trying to escape from Shawshank. But at some point I realized this was something I’d wanted badly and long enough for my place, that I wasn’t going to let a little rat feces stand in my way.
So I started drilling, which was difficult enough, as my drill is old and underpowered, and the batteries (I have two of them) can barely hold a charge anymore. I would only get a few minutes use at best before having to swap them and let one recharge. I’d managed to learn a few things from the cable guys, fortunately, such as that my office wall was plywood-backed (and that I would therefore have to drill holes; a drywall saw wasn’t sufficient) and where the concrete was I’d have to drill past. The poor guy who went into the crawl space before me also informed me that there was a white electrical cable running through the maze that I could follow which would lead me right to my unit.
That day I went to Home Depot and purchased what I could to prepare myself: a couple of mini-flashlights, work gloves and a surgical mask (in part to protect myself from the dust, but mostly hoping to ward off the smell). Once I’d finished drilling holes and dropping cables down in the evening I plucked up my courage and went off to the storage closet where the entrance was. I wasn’t keen on going at night when it was dark, but I needed Elizabeth’s help inside the condo to both feed the cables and retrieve them for me, and I didn’t want to put off the endeavour until the next time we were both there and available to do it.
I reckon the whole ordeal took about two hours. I had two sets of cable to run from two different locations: a network cable and an HDMI cable from the den into the living room, and then a second network cable and a regular phone cable from the bedroom to the den. The first set of cables should have been relatively straightforward as I would be wiring along the exact same path that the cable guys had. I wasn’t at first certain that I wanted to go the extra mile to do the wires to the bedroom, but I figured that if I was committed to going to all that trouble, I may as well get everything I want out of it and not leave myself ever tempted to go down there again.
Getting around was even more difficult than I anticipated, and I likened it to Catherine Zeta-Jones’ big payday scene in Entrapment. I was literally squirming on my belly through blocks of concrete and squeezing my body between pipes and the ceiling above me. There were smatterings of feces but I never actually saw a dead rat; I expect it’s because I chose to go in the evening and was spared by darkness and luck. Each room was its own miniature expedition to get across on my hands, knees and belly. That was the only way for me to do this kind of thing: very slow, patient progress, bite-sized morsels of a few metres or so and then stopping for about five minutes to catch my breath and summon the energy to proceed. My biggest regret was not thinking to get knee pads… my whole body was dinged, bruised and banged up pretty badly from the experience, but my poor knees on that rough gravel suffered the worst of it by far.
I followed that white electrical cord with the same naked trust of a sailor navigating from the North Star for what seemed like an eternity… when I finally saw the first of my cables dangling from the ceiling I nearly collapsed out of relief that I’d found it. It took me quite a while to get my bearings and run the two cables that were there from the den to the correct spot in the living room, but it was a big victory for morale when it was done. The two cables I’d dropped from my bedroom proved far more frustrating, though, as I was completely unable to locate them. The worst part was being about 75% confident that I was in the right area, with Elizabeth above me banging on the wall, trying to give me some kind of sonar location, but still having that 25% uncertainty about both where I was and how I was oriented relative to the wall.
I finally came to the conclusion that the wires were most likely sticking into the insulation above me, and nearly despaired entirely as there were rows of the stuff overhead, I couldn’t be certain of where I was, the cables could still be anywhere, I was on the threshold of a bulkhead that was difficult and painful to cross, and I my reserves of energy were getting desperately low. I made my best guess, though, and was fortunate when I yanked on the insulation there and my two wires neatly dropped down. I ran them over to the den, and spent the next twenty minutes or so slowly but triumphantly working my way back to the entrance… even still, it took forever, and even the light of the trap door when I finally could see the exit couldn’t speed the passage of time.
Four days later I still ache and am tender from the whole experience, but I am healing well enough. I’ve finished most of the terminations and wall plates for the various cables, although I still have one special part I’m waiting on delivery for. Before this project, I had only wireless networking throughout my condo, no phone line to anywhere other than my kitchen and bedroom, and cable in the living room only by virtue of a hack job I’d done running an extension cable outside the condo and back inside. Now I have:
- Cable television run cleanly to the living room (instead of a loose cable outside my condo)
- Network cables run from both the living room and bedroom to the den
- Phone cable running to my den (where I have the fax machine for my office)
- An HDMI (high-def video cable) running from the den to living room (so I can run high-def off my computer to the television)
It was a gruelling mission, and I wouldn’t go back down there again if you paid me a thousand dollars to do it, but all in all I’m both happy with and proud of the results of it!
Dan.