For the last two weeks I've been installing security cameras, microphones and DVRs at some of my Enforcement offices and truck scales. It's been fun since the project involves 10 different sites, is going to require hardcoded IP addresses for the DVRs, running hundreds of feet of coax cable, soldering power tails, compressing BNC ends onto the cable, mounting the hardware and then getting it all working in conjunction.
Two additional aspects of this project make it even more fun ...
1) I entered this project not knowing a single thing about AV equipment (and the project was delivered in a lump sum of several boxes with no diagrams and no instructions) so the learning curve hasn't been so much a steep one as it has been a vertical face that had to be ascended in quick order.
2) I'm having to mount equipment and run cables through suspended ceilings that look like long unused sets from that old movie "Kingdom of the Spiders."
I hate spiders ... and octopuses or octopi. Anything that outnumbers me in arms 4 to 1 has an unfair advantage in the biological pecking order and must be purged with fire, high velocity dual purpose explosive rounds or a tactical nuke dropped from orbit ... and the sooner the better.
How I feel when I climb on a step ladder ...
...and how I look when I push the suspended
ceiling tile up and out of the way.
ceiling tile up and out of the way.
... and what I fully expect to see when I do push the
suspended ceiling tile out of the way
suspended ceiling tile out of the way
... either that or Shelob.
The good news is that where I'm working there aren't any Xenomorphs or a backdoors to Shelob's lair but there are a large amount of Black Widow and Brown Widow spiders ... two things I don't want to sink their fangs into me or inject me with their toxic venom. You probably won't die from a Widow bite ... but you'll wish that you had ... and it can be hospital time.
Nope. No Combat Incinerator units in stock.
Ditto on the 10mm Pulse Rifle with pump action grenade launcher.
I swear, the next time that I have to run cable, I'm going to invite a few friends along ...
Since the warehouse didn't have a 10mm Pulse Rifle, a Combat Incinerator unit or any spider proof combat armor, I settled for the next best thing and got me a can of RAID from supplies. Armed with a potent poison of my own, in spray form, I began to count the dead and after they stopped twitching, I took some long forceps and placed the dead predators in a plastic box to show my coworkers.
As of this morning, the body count is 17 Black Widows and 1 Brown Widow. All of these fatalities were taken from one site that I had to install equipment at. I have four more sites (eight subsites) to put equipment in. I wonder how many more of these I'll have to wade through ...?
Later that afternoon, the body count had increased by 3 additional Black Widows and 4 additional Brown Widows. One Black Widow and one Brown Widow had built webs directly behind the exterior door handles of the office doors, meaning that if I hadn't looked first when I went to open the door to the office I would have wrapped my fingers around a great big world of hurt.
I'll keep you updated as the body count grows ... and looking at my box of spiders, I'm reminded of that old Drive By Trucker song ... "Box of Spiders."