I have not posted about the work that I have been up to, but I’ve been learning a lot about the various systems, applications, and the many different types of computer equipment that I’ll have to support. I’m also learning to work on computers in other languages besides just French and English. (I’m making a cheat-cheat for OK and Next in many languages that I will share once I get a bigger list since that is what I click 90% of the time although it doesn’t always fix the problem)

Last week I learned that one of the buildings that the branch occupied was no longer going to be used because the high school moved to a different location so they needed to move out the network equipment in order to rent the building out to another mission organization. I thought, OK, I’ll go with the guys and get to see one of the different areas away from where I normally work.

We get to the other location and they showed me what they were planning and I was looking around and thought; how are we going to do that without some really BIG ladders! We were going to move 3 external network cables from one side of the complex to the other side of the complex all attached to a really tall tower. My second thought was I don’t think these same cables are going to be long enough to reach.

We went inside the building to remove the first group of cables and we couldn’t push them out, someone was going to need to pull them, so Francis walked along the exterior ledge of the second floor and pulled them out as I feed them from the inside.

Then we had to get the cables over the top of a power line so we used a truck that someone left there for us to use as a ladder.

Finally Emmanuel climbed the tower to tie a rope to where the cables were crossing so we could add some extra support. We had 12 inches to spare when we finished routing the cables through the ceiling and window and after we connected and tested them everything worked fine!

I really was there also – Someone had to try and document the move with a camera phone!