Cable Porn
Stop, wait, what in the hell is “cable porn”? Simply put, “Cable Porn”, is the art of making your cable, wires, and conduit, nice, clean, and tidy. Not sure about the history of the name. I work in IT and have laid out a ton of network cables (copper and fiber, both).
About twenty years ago, I was working as a civilian on a Marine Corps base. My civilian team didn’t heed my warnings about cleaning up the network cable mess. We had 6 different networks each having a different security classification (like Top Secret), and each classification had a different colored network patch cable.
I got tired of it looking like the below photo, and I told my team to clean it up, they didn’t take me seriously, and over the week-long Christmas break, my team had to work one day, repatching the entire thing, as I (on the direction from our CIO), pulled every single network cable.Â
This meant that they had to go through each cube and figure out what was patched to what workstation and then make the correct network cable.
Let’s just say that after that adventure, my team took better care when they were making network patches. And yes, I was there with my team cleaning up the mess.
Before - Network Cables
For some reason, there is always that guy who insists that the best way to run network cable, is to use the long cable he can find and then not use any of the wire management solutions that you might have installed. If you don’t go behind him and clean it up, then if becomes a problem. Unchecked that will almost always end up like the cables in these photos.Â
After - Network Cables
This is almost like it is artwork, and these cable installers certainly know their profession. I can say that my cables look very much like that (these are all the backbone and trunk network cables). There is never a reason that the backbone and truck cables to not look like these. These should always be installed by BICSI-certified cable installers.Â
Not Just For Network Cables
This is NOT how you want your phone patching to look like, ouch
