Cables and Knots

After college...well after a short stint at a bank and then as a messenger...I got a job at the local television station. There are a world of stories from that experience, but that will have to wait for another time. My job at the station was to drive a van around scouting out locations where the 5 o' clock news could go LIVE as they are want so often to do. Atop the van was a set of "stingers" that sent a microwave signal to the company's tower high on Queen Anne Hill. Today, there are no longer stingers, but dishes and the vans are a lot nicer, too.

The job not only required scouting, but setting up all the behind the scenes technology that allowed the reporter to simply pick up a microphone and go "live" from a car accident, a flood, a murder, a trial, or an election scene. The set up time ranged anywhere from an hour (though if pressed, we could get everything running in 15 minutes...but we were union workers and it took a lot to "press" us into speed) to four hours. The four hour set up usually involved some kind of relay from one microwave transmitter to the next and miles and miles of cable.

My least favorite set up was the Court House. Though there were only two relays required, cable had to be laid from whichever courtroom to a closet at the back of a judge's chambers on the fourth floor (the only real window access where the relay could reach the van). The trouble wasn't rolling out all that cable, the trouble was taping it all down (lawsuit avoidance policy) and then, after the 1 minute plus 30 news story (that's how they block out the time), the clean up of all that duct tape and cable.

I was always given the cable clean up job after it was determined that I could appropriately wind up cable faster than anyone else on the crew. "Appropriately" refers to a rapid over and under method too difficult to explain with simple words.

Four hours to set up the courthouse, two hours to break it all down. Six hours of work for a story that ran maybe three or four times for a total of no more than 10 minutes.

When I wasn't on duty, I often opened the back of the van to find a mass of cables tangled together and wrapped around all the other equipment stuffed into the windowless van. In between scouting and setting up, I'd sit in the back of the van and detangle cables, reorganize the van, and prepare myself for the possibility of a murder or a really bad traffic accident where I could whip out my clean and organized network of cables in 15 minutes or less (if really really pressed).

Today, I sprawled out under my desk to make sense of the cables spewing from my computer, printer, cable modem, and phone in an attempt to install a wireless router allowing me to access the internet from my wireless laptop anywhere in the house. I was reminded of all those hours unrolling and rolling up all the cables and cords in the back of that news van. I was reminded of the stories that required my crew to run from one end of the airport to the other because we'd received the wrong gate number from our news coordinator just in time to set up the whole shibang one minute before broadcast. I was reminded of the plane crash when the cables rolled right over the bodies and I spent tearful hours wiping the cables clean with a bloody cloth. I was reminded of all the men I worked with (I was the only female member of my crew) who rarely RARELY rolled up the cables "appropriately." I'd often arrive at their LIVE broadcasts and see lumps of tangled cable strewn across the road to the van parked half in the gutter and half on the road.

My computer cables aren't that bad, but they are amass and so today, with some time on my hands, I unwound and detangled though not to much satisfaction. Wires and cables are still thick under the desk and even though I straightened and unknotted most of them, their directions and functions prevent any tidiness. I even bought those "cable managers" to stuff the cables in, but now there are black tubes intertwined with the cables that couldn't be managed, as it were.

Meanwhile, the wireless router will not work as my computer is "too old" as the young man on the phone told me when I sought help from the 1-800 help line. My computer is four years old and I must purchase another piece of equipment in order for the wireless router to work.

Peachy.

I wonder how many wires are connected to that little piece of technology?

"Ann," I asked in my sweetest voice, "Do you think it's time to buy a new computer?"

Would this solve my cable dilemma, I wonder? Ummmm?