Day 0 - We get the Hall

I arrive at 8am in a slight state of panic. Because all the carpet was
laid yesterday, the decorator got a jump start and more that half the gem
structures are already built. And we were supposed to pull through all
the drops, so stressing that we have to do some emergency pit
work. However as I walk around I notice that not only have all the drops
already been pulled from the pits, but Gary has terminated tagged and
tested them.

When I bailed up Gary later for the test reports he said

"I gave them to you. "
"Where ?"
"On the fluke you loaned me, I saved all the reports on the DSP"

The NOC was so far progressed I had to get them to remove a panel so I
could get the racks in. There was, however, no power so I track down
the foreman who points me to the sparkies. We walks over to the booth
looks at the situation and says "Wait a sec" he walks over to the next
pit, grabs the distribution panel and plugs it into my pit. "Will that
work for you ?" "Yes" I sigh. For some reason I was expecting this to
be a wearisome 4 hour waiting game, but instead Everyone Here Is Your
Mate and "No worries, I'll do it in just a sec" is the mantra

At around 9:30 the team starts to arrive, Gary is there finishing up
some of the aerial runs, Worldcom are wrangling a rack from their CO to
the show floor, Glenn, Bernard and the usual suspects are wandering in,
and a small team of volunteers are also making their way towards the
NOC. I'm about to start to wonder if we have too many people, when a
truck arrives with all the APC equipment. SO I'm able to get the boys
racking and stacking while another few teams walk the floor and check
that the contractors aren't doing something stupid with my drops. We
quickly become a busy little team.

Colorful lexicon.

It is nice to be back in a country where we're not afraid to call a spade
a spade and a friend a bastard. Australia has what can only be described
as a colourful lexicon and is really not afraid to use it. Over here you
can safely interchange the word "Damn" with "Bugger" and still be
considered a member of polite society. "Bugger it", "Oh Bugger", "Bugger
him, and the horse he rode in on" and my favorite, "Full of Buggery", Are
the kinds of words that I often heard coming from the mouth of the
receptionist.

Of course, once you get onto a building site, like the show floor, that's
when the contractors and their years of hard swearing experience truly
come into form. Long working days and hard drinking nights can bring out
the poet in some people, so I was priveliged to overhear this masterpiece:

" Oh for fucks sake Harry, you've gone and fucked the fucker.
Now I'll have to get my fucking tools and fuckin un-fuck it. "

Once we get the NOC stabilised the team sits down for the mandatory 3M
fibre termination class, questionable only in the fact that the the
terminations I'm demonstrating are also the first ones I've ever done.
But we're working on the assumption that I only need one of my 3 pairs so
we can afford to make a few mistakes. The VF45 termination seems to be so
easy that we leave the last PED to a random pair of volunteers to finish
up the work and test all the links.

Worldcom have made the final install and patch - like all telco racks all
the cable is Very Neat And Tidy and every end has been polished and
attenuated to the Specified Range. But this also means that WE have
externals - blindingly fast, watching one download we were pretty sure
that what was slowing down the 60meg of data was not the pipe, but the
slow disk drive.

Paul From extreme has been madly trying to hot stage his network. He's
been patching like a man possessed and has configs coming out if his ears.
Muttering 'EAPS!' like a proclamation he emerges sometime later and
proudly presents an unlabeled clusterfuck of 3 peds, 6 routers and a
LOT of Gig backbone. "But look, the ring fails over...". We decide to
leave him with the cleanup, it's Beer O'Clock.