My first coax experiences.. and my first job as a computer tech.

As a young man in the late 1990s, I started my first job as a computer technician. It started out well paying, earning over twice what I was earning per hour on Sundays pumping petrol was paying.  

I worked for a small family run company that had a number of business clients and did some subcontracting work. 

I'd done some networking before, having worked for a couple of internet providers back before most people knew what they were, but I'd never really done any cabling. 

At the time, 10Base2 cabling was common - RG58 with BNC connectors, running in a ring topology, each PC having a T connector and the ends needing to be terminated with a 50Ohm terminator.  

The stuff ran at 10Mbps, and for the time, it was OK. The occasional networked printer, and for a lot of our clients - a single dial up modem connected to a PC or server that was sharing it's few kilobit per second connection allowing services like email to function. 

Before I started, I did know that these networks were finicky - breaking the "ring" at any point would cause the whole thing to break, and depending on the network cards and protocols in use, could cause PCs to lock up. 

I should point out at this time that CAT5 was starting to be used by clients who had higher bandwidth requirements. Even back then, one was supposed to be licensed in Australia to terminate the stuff. The hardware was expensive though - hubs were simply dumb devices and switches were very, very expensive. Few existing clients used the stuff. 

It was late summer. One client - a nursing home, wanted additional PCs installed, which meant that they wanted additional cabling installed. My boss decided that we were up to the challenge. 

The building layout was logical - an administration building with everything close together and a single long coax run leading down a corridor to a device that acted as an amplifier to push the signal to a PC. 

The building itself at the time was a little over 100 years old. Limestone walls. High ceilings. 

I started my day as usual - dressed in my nice dress shirt and trousers with no idea what we were doing until I got there. 

We started a climb into the ceiling space - plenty of room, but filthy from a century of dust, stinking hot (it was nearly 35C outside) and I needed to crawl across the timber work - into the eves. I'd done this before helping out an electrician at home whose knees were starting to fail him. I'd never though, had to deal with insulation bats before. 

In the end, I'd spent about an hour laid out flat, in the dark, resting on top of insulation bats, breathing century old dust and straining to pull cabling, only for my boss to appear, shining a light on me, illuminating the mouse carcass that was literally right next to where my face had been. 

I connected a couple of runs in the ceiling space, and returned to the ground. Now completely putrid; covered head to toe in dust and spiderwebs, and with dark wet patches covering my body from sweat. 

Sadly, the fun was just starting. 

We started up the newly connected PCs.. and the network became intermittent. Intermittently. It worked, then it kinda worked, then it stopped, then it worked. On and off. 

Eventually, we took down the entire office, and bypassed a chunk of our new cabling, brought the whole thing back up and everything worked. We tested our new section of cabling. It tested fine. 

We reconnected everything, and it worked. Then someone used the photocopier. When they stopped, things went back to normal. Until they used it again. 

We finally worked out that some existing coax ran behind their antique copier.  It had never caused an issue before, but now that we had an extra 15m of cable in the mix, the interference from the copier was breaking the network. 

My boss asks about the PC at the far end of the building and if it could be disconnected for a while. Being told that was fine, he sends me to find the amplifier in the ceiling. By this point, it's now close to 50C in that space. It's dark, and it's a difficult space to navigate through. Eventually I locate the device, remove it, but cleverly having the thought to put a joiner in between the two coax runs.. just in case that it might work... 

We get it down into the office and reconnect it close to the photocopier. No more network drop out. Surprisingly, the device managed to push the signal well enough that the PC at the other end of the building still had functional network. 

I stood in that office for hours, filthy, sweating and stinking while we worked on solving that problem. Very professional. 

That was my filthiest, hottest work day - and one of my first as a tech. I learned a lot that day, including how much I hated 10Base2 networking.. and running network cabling. 

Fairly soon I was a regular at the near by Dick Smith store, buying my own crimping tools for coax, phone and data cabling, my own screwdrivers and my own multimeter. I put all of them to good use; often alone once my boss took off interstate during the week, doing the subcontracting work that was largely keeping the office lights on. 

There were some interesting clients that I was exposed to with them. Sadly their mismanagement did little to keep them in business. The boss' wife disliked me, and she'd made that abundantly clear to me many, many times. I'd gone so far as to wind up in a traineeship for them so they would receive some government incentives - at a significant pay decrease.

I RPL'ed most of the course work - to which she was happy to abuse me for because I was rarely at TAFE during business hours and decided that meant that I wasn't doing anything. Of course, when I did go, that was a problem because I wasn't available and therefore wasn't available to help their clients - so they couldn't make any money (I was their sole employee). 

A cheap Chinese PC case was poorly designed, with the power switch close to the chassis. After a routine clean, I must have knocked what little insulation over the power plug there was enough for it to short when I turned it on. This took out quite a few buildings in the street. No RCDs in our office. A nice warm day, and apparently I'd managed to take out a fuse on a power pole. 

This lead to stupid rules like not being allowed to plug in a computer without the lid on (and no comprehension of me pointing out that solved nothing). Then there was whinging about my once daily trip around the corner to buy coffee, which had only started after she decided to no longer buy milk or coffee supplies given that her husband wasn't there to drink it. 

Late 1999, we were doing a lot of Y2K auditing for some large multinational clients, which was fun. Flying around the country with cases full of disks. Having to show armed security that the multimeter in my hand luggage wasn't a bomb. Fun times. 

As the year wrapped up, I mentioned wanting to wrap up the traineeship side of things. The low wages were stifling, and most of the competencies I had left to have completed at TAFE were likely to also be RPLed. 

I had a call the next day telling me not to come in. The following day I called my boss, and asked if I should come in. He said no. 

Finally, I got a call from my traineeship co-ordinator telling me that my employer wanted to end the traineeship; that I hadn't been doing any of my course work, that TAFE were complaining about me, that clients were complaining about me and so on. 

The traineeship co-coordinator had already done her homework; she knew that TAFE had no issue with me - she could see that I'd RPL'd most of the course work, I'd requested - and aced the final assessments for a number of subjects that I was asked to do (I was prone to walking into a unit, and just asking for the final assessment) and she saw notes that they expected that I was going to be able to RPL the rest of it. 

Something she also knew was that I'd spoken to my TAFE co-ordinator a few days before and mentioned that something was up, and that they'd already offered to allow me to complete the traineeship as an employee. They had a project that some students were working on that needed a UNIX person to give them a hand with. They were quite familiar with me and understood that I was there mostly as a job requirement, despite having done first year IT at University, so the content wasn't of any real challenge to me. 

I was dragged into a meeting with my employer where all kinds of lies were leveled against me - all provided by the bosses wife (he himself didn't utter a word). I was all kinds of lazy and incompetent, a bad student and so on. TAFE supposedly hated me. I was keen to argue the point, but I'd been advised against saying anything. 

Their complaints were documented. They were expecting that the whole traineeship would be cancelled there and then giving her some kind of validation in her loathing of me. My coordinator turned to me and confirmed that the traineeship had been transferred to TAFE now that I was employed by them and that they'd been impressed by the references provided by a number of my now former employers clients - those who had apparently complained about me as it turned out (there were simply so few at the time that I had few to choose from). 

I'd never seen my former employers wife jaw drop, wiping away her trademark smirk so fast.  That was almost as great as the cheque I received from the ATO about a year and half later when they discovered that my former employer had failed to make some of my superannuation payments and had fined them appropriately. I could imagine how disgusted she would have been at that.

Their doors closed literally days later. My work at TAFE was really just a few hours a week. My phone was constantly ringing with my former employers clients calling me wanting help and I was more than happy to do so. Within 2 months I was billing more hours on my own with their clients than they had been. 

I noticed months later that their business had been sold and their name and logo was tied to another business. It seemed to last for a couple of months before it vanished. I guess a business that lost its best customers to a former employee wasn't a great investment. 

Interesting times for the following couple of years. I basically spent the first 2 years of my 20s self employed, learning some hard lessons about business, life and love. Bottoms of bottles were investigated for answers to seemingly important (at the time) questions. Free feeds were never turned down. Nor were gigs with the band I was hanging around with on the weekends. My body may have only aged 2 years, but my soul aged decades.