Donks of the Past: The Cable Guy

Greetings Manifestites! The other night I was chatting with a friend via IM, and I relayed the story I'm about to write up, and we agreed that even though it happened almost 15 years ago that it's well worth telling. So, I bring you the story of Morphy, the cable guy.

I also decided to expand this a bit, and am inviting submissions from anyone out there that wants to relay a good story. If you have something that you think might be a good Donks of the Past story, please email it to me at xaqmorphy@gmail.com. I'll post these as often as I receive them. If I receive many of them, I'll pick a winner who will receive, well, nothing, but having something on the Manifesto should be praise in and of itself. Self-inflicted accidental injuries are always a favorite, as are driving incidents and of course just all-around donkishness. Ok, on with it now.

The year is, umm, 1994 maybe. I'm working for a distribution company in a newish office building with a big warehouse attached. The building is set up so that the whole thing is basically 2 stories, but in the office areas, the ceiling is dropped down to a standard 14 ft. height or whatever the typical standard ceiling height is. There was no 2nd floor, as everything above the drop ceiling was open, up to the upper ceiling of the building. The warehouse of course was wide open all the way around.

When it came time to upgrade the old coax network to cat5, the drop ceiling made it really easy to get things set up. We had contractors drop most of the cable, but there were a few out of the way locations that we decided to cable ourselves. This is where I come in. As the youngest person on staff, I was often volunteered for jobs that no one else wanted to do. "Morphy, here, go stand on this wheeled chair on the file floor and adjust the security camera." "Morphy, go underneath the filed floor and bring the power whip from one side of the room to the other (while we cover the floor tiles back up)." "Morphy, for some reason we used 50 ft. phone cables to connect these 16 modems to the PBX, even though they are on opposite sides of the wall. The extra cables were just stuffed in the wall and/or under the floor. Take them all apart, one at a time so we don't lose connectivity, and replace them with nice 3 ft. cables." "Morphy, fill up this guy's cube who is on vacation with balloons." "Morphy, shrink wrap the asshat who keeps giving you these tasks to a pallet and ship him to New York." You know, standard procedure stuff like that.

So here's the task: run a cable from room 1 to room 3. Room 2 happens to be the main senior management conference room which is in between rooms 1 and 3. Senior management happens to be in a week long series of all day meetings to try and save the company from bankruptcy (translation: coming up with lists of people to lay off). So, it's not like we can just go into the conference room, remove a ceiling tile every few feet and feed the cable through. We also needed this up and running immediately, so we couldn't even wait until that evening to do it. Yup, you guessed it..."Morphy, climb up this ladder and walk this cable 30 ft. or so across the ceiling and drop it down into room 3."

Oh sure, I bet you're sitting there asking yourself how they expected me to walk across a drop ceiling. Well, I was in luck (?!?!?) because there was a 6" or so wide girder about a foot above the drop ceiling that ran the length of the room, and a pipe/girder thing above that to hold onto. The plan: they tie the cable to my belt loop, and I carefully walk across the girder, holding onto the pipe as support. When I reach the other end someone hands me a wire cutters, I snip the cable, feed it through the hole in the tile, and someone was even going to be nice enough to put another ladder there for me to climb down. As those Guiness guys from the commercials say: BRILLIANT! Come on readers, you should know better by now. The astute reader should even be able to figure out what happens next...

About half-way across the girder, there's one of those air vent thingers, and I basically have to work my way around it. Now I'm not really sure what happened next, and of course no one admitted anything, so I never did find out. One of a few things happened: I either lost my footing, some jackass pulled on the cable attached to me, the cable became stuck somewhere, or we had a minor earthquake that made me lose my balance (those aren't very common in Wisconsin, by the way). Whatever happened there, the next thing I know, I'm falling through the air, and THUD, I hit the conference room table. That's right folks, right through the drop ceiling, and smack onto almost the exact fucking middle of the conference room table where at that exact time, management was deciding the fate of some of my co-workers.

For what seemed like an eternity that was more like about 2 seconds, nothing happened. I looked up, saw a lot of really surprised looks, and blurted out the first thing that came to my mind: "oh my god, I'm so sorry I interrupted your meeting!" Most of the room still sat there with dazed looks on their faces, but one guy actually picked up a pen and wrote something down! I then regained my senses and said "hey, you aren't going to fire me for this, are you?" THEN the room broke out in laughter, about the same time my colleagues burst through the door.

After everyone managed to settle down, we evaluated the situation, and were completely amazed at what we found. Other than a bruise on my hip, no one was hurt. No less than 5 ceiling tiles fell along with the metal brackets, and I dodged everything that could have caused injury: coffee cups, staplers, pens/pencils, the projector, everything. No cups were spilled. One guy got hit in the head with a piece of one ceiling tile, but they were light weight enough that he wasn't hurt at all. I went right in between 2 big light fixtures, and they didn't move at all. Nothing. Just falling what was at least 10 ft. onto a hard table, that's all. Just another day on the job I guess!

I didn't live that one down for months. No one ever did fess up or even really speculate as to what happened. I had a feeling I knew who did it, but I think his little impromptu trip to New York settled the score quite nicely. If he didn't do it...ummm...dude, I'm sorry.

Yours Donkily,

Morphy