My best meories are probably no more different than most true and proud cable dogs. I enjoy hearing from those dedicated line people to this profession. Too many people's work ethic now days is " It can,t be done". Those of us who started years ago know that you learned to wear many hats and learned how to do what was needed.
So one of my stories is the time myself and a couple employees built 7 miles of overlashed 500 cable to get the local school channel on line. We were the system service techs running our route in the mrorning and early afternoon then working on this project. There was a deadline too. We pulled and lashed through some of the thickest pinetrees in August because the town loved to plant them under the untility lines. We ran out of lash wire at about the 1/2 mile point because our technical manager who was promoted by the bedroom factor, didn't realize that evey foot of cable bearing strand needs nore than 1 foot of lash wire. MMMMMMMM he didn't think that lash wire wraps around a foot of cables and may have a ratio of 1.3 feet for every one foot of strand? lol. He aslo could not comprehend why there was a waste factor at the end of a roll of cable or lash wire? Can't tell you how many slices we used during his tenure as chief tech. I guess he was too busy with his affair with the office manage to care. Well there another cable industry story and history, hey? He also gave us shoted housings to splice in on the Saturday before launch was scheduled and didn't know where to place the amps?
Well me and the other techs pulled the cable through the trees and allowed the` tree branches to hold the cable like rollers, After trying to hot up the amps and finding the shorted housing, we pulled them and went back to the office to solder in new gap protectors in ther non mother board old vikoa housings. Anyone know what I mean ? We grabbed a calculator and placed the amps every 1900'. Sometime late Sunday we were up and running with signal to the end and ready to tie it into the plant for a new conference meeting the next day. We were to be the first cable system in the stae to have a school channel backhauled and tied into the residential customers.
First thing Monday AM we tied the combining splitter in during a maintnenance window. Just before the 10AM news and press conference a lightening storm hit. We didn't hesitate to go out and work through the 16 amps by leap frogging and jumping mutiple counts of amps to finally get the combining point. All the amps were running up to the end? Mmmmmm, old vikoa 12 channel amps running after a storm? That was odd in itself, lol. Here the combining point had a field bandpass filter soldered in an old housing before combining into the plant at the ninth amplifier from the headend. The first nine amps had no customers so the school line was not taken back to the headend for combining. When we hit the combining point, my rush to get up the pole casued me to drop the bucket dowm from the driving position too soon and it came down on my thumb. It opened up my thumb and blood was gushing. With my bloody thumb and soaking body from the rain, I checked the bandpass filter. When I opened up the case I found our stay dry tech manager who stayed in the office protecting the office girls during the storm, lol, was no good at soldering! His cold solder joint opened up. I bypass the filter getting the school channel on just in time but the filter dumped noise all over the other channels. LOL Yep all 11 other channels back then.
I wrapped my thumb with electrical tape and went to the emergency room. The trip resulted in red blood all over the truck ( inside and out )and me. LOL But we got it on the air and in time! MMMMMMMMMMMM some 30 years later the scar on my thunmb is almost gone, darn it!
This is CABL.com posting #254695. Tiny Link: cabl.co/mbep9
