Ah, the former employer with a breathtaking volume of
... abandoned parallel printer cables above the ceiling tiles.
You can't cut them to length, so they rolled the excess up and left it sitting on the ceiling tiles. Over the years, the tiles would start to bulge downward in the middle from the weight of the cables. My predecessor apparently gave up and returned whatever multiplex box they tried to share an HP pen plotter.
As a bonus, this was also an L-shaped building with a 1.2kv green utility stepdown transformer on each end. Thicknet trunk in the ceiling running the length of the building in the Chicago suburbs. Which made thunderstorms interesting.
Lighting would strike a light fixture in the parking lot and the brief earth ground difference between the utility feeds would inject a whole lot of energy into that poor network. Vampire taps had to be replaced in the ceiling and a few Sun Sparcstation motherboards with the AUI connections blown.
Oh yeah, this was also the company where I had to buy extension cables with only ONE socket on the end as my coworkers would see the empty socket and plug in their desk fans and at one time, a coffee pot, blowing the APC UPS.
Had to convince the corporate "lords of the ERP Micro-Vax" into letting me replace that mess with 10-baseT and a DEC network bridge as the sacrificial lightning protector. A year later, they pulled the whole ThickNet out and put in shiny new DEC network hubs and 10-BaseT.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
