Published by Brian Slezak on 16 Jan 2009 at 04:26 pm
Steal-Proofing IT Stuff
Steal-proof Cable
Ok, I have to brag on my co-worker a bit, because I can’t get him to blog on this himself. This morning I came in to find one of extra long networking cables outside our office door. How did you get that returned, you may ask? Why did it not walk away, but get returned outside your office door? Pictures are worth a thousand words.
Let’s break down how Jeremy steal-proofed this girly bad boy. 1. He used a displeasing color. Few people look at a nearly flourescent pink cable and think, “Oh I gotta have that.” 2. He terminated the ends with jacks, not plugs. Looking at it, the novice would surmise that won’t work for them. 3. He finished the cable with ridiculously short jumpers, which no one in their right mind really needs. “Ooo, that would work perfect for my … nothing?”
Evil Genius at Work
Tags: cable, networking, steal proof
Ian Beyer on 16 Jan 2009 at 5:03 pm #
The funny thing is, over the course of my tenure at JCS, I installed a crapload of the Pink Stuff (originally Belden, but later CommScope) at Sprint. The wireless labs there probably have a couple MILLION feet of the pink wire. And yes, under a blacklight, it actually *does* glow. This is very cool in a darkened datacenter with all the blinkenlights and some open floor tiles.
Rumour has it that the color was originally a custom job for Hallmark, and enough people wanted something other than the standard set (at the time) of wire color, and lo, it became a stock color along with teal and the other 10 standard telecom colors (blue orange, green, brown, slate/grey, white, red, black, yellow, and violet) – so cable is available in pretty much the same set of colors as the inner strands of a 12-strand fiber optic cable.
I think the other reason Jeremy put jacks on the cable is that Cat 6 solid conductor is a bear to terminate onto an RJ45 plug.