My house was the opposite it had a complete lack of electrical sockets, for example the living room runs from front to back and is 8 meters long had 2 single sockets in the whole room. It also had one fuse for the house….
The kitchen had a socket on one wall and the one for the cooker, and the bedrooms had one socket each…
I had the place rewired, with now 3 double sockets and 4 cat5 behind the tv and 3 more doubles in the living room, one bedroom got converted to an office and that has 10 double sockets and 10 cat5 outlets, and the other rooms got at least 2 double sockets each.
The garage got a load of sockets as did the shed as well.
Christ, how many satellite dishes/LNBs did the previous owner have, Mr Dabbs ?!? Tres 1990s. And to think, all that video content now comes into your house through that shonkey PTT socket.
Actually, on second glance, that looks like a "multiroom" install for terrestrial TV RF. That probably stopped working after the French switchover to TNT.
Jun 16, 2023·edited Jun 16, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
An excellent advertisement for WFH. If I so much as think about leaving an unwashed coffee cup in the kitchen my wife beats me around the head with it.
Have to say that those French phone jacks had me totally baffled when we arrived...
Years ago I worked with a guy installing and upgrading radio studios. In one of them, in Hamilton, Ontario, behind the mixing console, was a heap of wire - I do not exaggerate - three feet across and two feet high. Wires ran into the pile from the mixer, and out of it to go elsewhere, but no-one knew what any specific wire did.
And twice daily the sound of an alarm would take over the audio feed for ten seconds and was broadcast to everyone who tuned into the station.
When the time came for a new mixing console (a refurbished McCurdy, for those who care) it was my great delight to chop off every last one of those wires and dump the great, heavy mass into a trash bin.
The alarm sound, which the previous "engineer" swore could not be defeated, disappeared at the same time...
They defeated that Cthulhu btw, they couldn't outrun it so they reversed course and rammed it. I'm not sure if anybody remembers that part. That is to say -- I think they defeated it... CAN it be defeated?
There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
Reminds me of the time I was INSTRUCTED to tidy up the old cabling under the false floor in the "computer room" at a site.
Much of the old cabling was obvious - serial cables for long-vanished minicomputers of various types. Bundles of CATn heading into an ex-computer room about to be repurposed as office space (and everything therein). Power cables which had already been isolated years before.
I ended up with several huge piles of cables of various types.
There then followed an "early doors" Friday with the inside of my car chock-full, and a visit to a scrap merchant who knew that CAT5 copper was worth more than CAT3 and paid accordingly.
All this with official approval from site management. They even issued a "ticket" to allow me to take the stuff away.
I once got about £300 for scrap cables from an installation which got stripped out and refurbished. I let my team have the money (not sure what they ever did with it - probably drank most it...) and I took several half days off when it suited me. Management did not need to know and everyone was happy.
Whilst not quite as bad as your house (I don't think), there are multitudes of stray cables in our new abode, but more concerning are the bits of kit that seem to have one-ended wires. I can find where, for example, the USB cable plugs into the non-functioning door-cam, and I can trace where it goes through the wall,, but can I find where the other end is? No. The same with the snakes of coax coming through the ceilings in each of the upstairs rooms - are any of them attached to the three (yes, three) TV antennae in the loft? Seemingly not - the coax attached to those goes somewhere else entirely! But - and here is a mystery just as big - even if they did/do attach to the antennae, how did they pug in anything to receive them. The bedrooms are as well-equipped with electric sockets as a 1950s terraced house! I try not to think about it any more, and just plan to increase the socket numbers and pull hard on the apparently redundant wires soon. If any of yours start to move, we might have an answer to what's going on!
That's a good thing to hope, but there's no sign of that at all. Those coax cables come through holes in the ceiling and dangle. The USB cable runs into a boxed area under the window with a nice hinged lid - and then just vanished. I can't even work out where to start a cable-puller on its journey!
easy way to test, grab the cable and shake it, if you hear a rattling sound your cable is in conduit and you are good, if you don't your cable has been run without conduit and you are fucked
My theory on work kitchen cleanliness is all the folks messing up any particular work kitchen have spouses at home that cancel out their sloppiness.
The distribution of sloppy vs non-sloppy workers/spouses is not randomly distributed across organizations, leaving the non-sloppy outnumbered by the sloppy as the norm.
Which means, by simple deduction, there exist a minority of workplaces (in the imaginary domain) where the kitchens are spotless at all times.
These workspaces are not only models of efficiency and a pleasure to work for but also the true economic engines that keep the rest of us sloppy bastards employed to limit the damage we do to our home kitchens so the true heroes of our economy can keep the music playing (and their work kitchens clean)
Moiseur Dabbs, the telephone wiring job you got has clearly been done to exacting standards. That being circa the year of our lord[1] 2018-2019, the exacting standard was "They want POTS instead of FTTH? In 2018!?", but it is an exacting standard nonetheless.
A mate of mine moved in to a similar house, every room has a brass IR sensor that looks like a light switch wired back to the "comms cabinet" where the Sky box etc lived. Sadly it only worked with a certain generation of Sky box so is now redundant.
Most surprised with all the Lovecraft/Cthulu references that there was no Metallica either, The Thing That Should Not Be seems particularly appropriate.
My house was the opposite it had a complete lack of electrical sockets, for example the living room runs from front to back and is 8 meters long had 2 single sockets in the whole room. It also had one fuse for the house….
The kitchen had a socket on one wall and the one for the cooker, and the bedrooms had one socket each…
I had the place rewired, with now 3 double sockets and 4 cat5 behind the tv and 3 more doubles in the living room, one bedroom got converted to an office and that has 10 double sockets and 10 cat5 outlets, and the other rooms got at least 2 double sockets each.
The garage got a load of sockets as did the shed as well.
Removing sockets is easy ... adding sockets is hard.
Oh tous écoutent la parole du Électricienne!
Come on Mr Dabbs, get your act together. Why the fuck would you think 2 core cable ends up as coax?
It's a mystery as I can't find any TV ariel sockets anywhere...
Looking at that cabling your house must be wired tighter than a CIA safe house. Start looking for those hidden cameras/microphones
This is why we must cut the damn cord ... these cords are making fools of us all :-)
Christ, how many satellite dishes/LNBs did the previous owner have, Mr Dabbs ?!? Tres 1990s. And to think, all that video content now comes into your house through that shonkey PTT socket.
Actually, on second glance, that looks like a "multiroom" install for terrestrial TV RF. That probably stopped working after the French switchover to TNT.
Kitchen description puts me in mind of the opening from Withnail & I.
An excellent advertisement for WFH. If I so much as think about leaving an unwashed coffee cup in the kitchen my wife beats me around the head with it.
Opposite for us. The kitchen at home always contains a mountain of unwashed dishes - sometimes smaller, sometimes larger, but always there.
Would you like me to send the wife round?
Then the fucker will rue the day!
Have to say that those French phone jacks had me totally baffled when we arrived...
Years ago I worked with a guy installing and upgrading radio studios. In one of them, in Hamilton, Ontario, behind the mixing console, was a heap of wire - I do not exaggerate - three feet across and two feet high. Wires ran into the pile from the mixer, and out of it to go elsewhere, but no-one knew what any specific wire did.
And twice daily the sound of an alarm would take over the audio feed for ten seconds and was broadcast to everyone who tuned into the station.
When the time came for a new mixing console (a refurbished McCurdy, for those who care) it was my great delight to chop off every last one of those wires and dump the great, heavy mass into a trash bin.
The alarm sound, which the previous "engineer" swore could not be defeated, disappeared at the same time...
They defeated that Cthulhu btw, they couldn't outrun it so they reversed course and rammed it. I'm not sure if anybody remembers that part. That is to say -- I think they defeated it... CAN it be defeated?
There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
https://gutenberg.org/files/68283/68283-h/68283-h.htm
Reminds me of the time I was INSTRUCTED to tidy up the old cabling under the false floor in the "computer room" at a site.
Much of the old cabling was obvious - serial cables for long-vanished minicomputers of various types. Bundles of CATn heading into an ex-computer room about to be repurposed as office space (and everything therein). Power cables which had already been isolated years before.
I ended up with several huge piles of cables of various types.
There then followed an "early doors" Friday with the inside of my car chock-full, and a visit to a scrap merchant who knew that CAT5 copper was worth more than CAT3 and paid accordingly.
All this with official approval from site management. They even issued a "ticket" to allow me to take the stuff away.
Plenty of pints were paid for!
That reminds me, I once got 'paid' for a job with several reels of Cat7 cable, do not ask me where it came from
I once got about £300 for scrap cables from an installation which got stripped out and refurbished. I let my team have the money (not sure what they ever did with it - probably drank most it...) and I took several half days off when it suited me. Management did not need to know and everyone was happy.
Whilst not quite as bad as your house (I don't think), there are multitudes of stray cables in our new abode, but more concerning are the bits of kit that seem to have one-ended wires. I can find where, for example, the USB cable plugs into the non-functioning door-cam, and I can trace where it goes through the wall,, but can I find where the other end is? No. The same with the snakes of coax coming through the ceilings in each of the upstairs rooms - are any of them attached to the three (yes, three) TV antennae in the loft? Seemingly not - the coax attached to those goes somewhere else entirely! But - and here is a mystery just as big - even if they did/do attach to the antennae, how did they pug in anything to receive them. The bedrooms are as well-equipped with electric sockets as a 1950s terraced house! I try not to think about it any more, and just plan to increase the socket numbers and pull hard on the apparently redundant wires soon. If any of yours start to move, we might have an answer to what's going on!
One would hope they are all in conduit so just push a cable puller in there and see where it comes out.
Electrician 101
That's a good thing to hope, but there's no sign of that at all. Those coax cables come through holes in the ceiling and dangle. The USB cable runs into a boxed area under the window with a nice hinged lid - and then just vanished. I can't even work out where to start a cable-puller on its journey!
easy way to test, grab the cable and shake it, if you hear a rattling sound your cable is in conduit and you are good, if you don't your cable has been run without conduit and you are fucked
Just checked (I'd never though of that before). It's the latter option!
My theory on work kitchen cleanliness is all the folks messing up any particular work kitchen have spouses at home that cancel out their sloppiness.
The distribution of sloppy vs non-sloppy workers/spouses is not randomly distributed across organizations, leaving the non-sloppy outnumbered by the sloppy as the norm.
Which means, by simple deduction, there exist a minority of workplaces (in the imaginary domain) where the kitchens are spotless at all times.
These workspaces are not only models of efficiency and a pleasure to work for but also the true economic engines that keep the rest of us sloppy bastards employed to limit the damage we do to our home kitchens so the true heroes of our economy can keep the music playing (and their work kitchens clean)
Moiseur Dabbs, the telephone wiring job you got has clearly been done to exacting standards. That being circa the year of our lord[1] 2018-2019, the exacting standard was "They want POTS instead of FTTH? In 2018!?", but it is an exacting standard nonetheless.
[1]: Other lords and calendars are available
A mate of mine moved in to a similar house, every room has a brass IR sensor that looks like a light switch wired back to the "comms cabinet" where the Sky box etc lived. Sadly it only worked with a certain generation of Sky box so is now redundant.
Most surprised with all the Lovecraft/Cthulu references that there was no Metallica either, The Thing That Should Not Be seems particularly appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgeSScjSU7U
Perhaps "Margate Fhtagn (cockles and mussels mix)" by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing might also work..?