I finished running in the last of a 25m reel of 1.5mm T&E cable I bought at the weekend today. It took a few hours, even though I was just blasting through the first fix, because there were loads of awkward bits.
Where the last bit of cable was bent to go through the hole in the bobbin, the sheath had shrunk back so I saw the cores for the first time. It turns out I'd ordered twin brown...
Did you hear the old (but true) story of some one who tried to order some terminals from Ferranti (I did say this was an old story) and quoted the Nato Stock Number of the item he wanted.
He got a reply asking if he really wanted a Blue Streak missile and pointing out that the delivery timescale would be quite long since they haddn't made one for some time.
(Told to me by an ex-RAF man who'd been working on the base at the time): stores orders 10 cartons of Kleenex. Supplier rings up to check that 10 are really wanted. 10 artic. lorries arrive. It might have been useful for the supplier to mention the unit quantity as well.
A colleague once managed to multiply the total amount of power cable needed, for all the equipment cases for a particular LUL contract, by the number of vehicles (effectively getting the square of the multiplier he should have used). This was big specialist stuff, on cable drums about 1.5 metre dia. Some was sold on to the vehicle builder, the rest sat around for ages until it eventually went for scrap.
I ordered 5km of yellow ethernet cable once. It was the only way to get a British manufacturer to tool up to make the stuff. I needed 1km for the job but I knew the rest would be used once I had demonstrated that ethernet actually worked. It was the first ethernet installed in GEC (and probably the UK).
It was for an Intel NRM system (the first in Europe) for anyone that remembers that far into the past. It was based on ISO networking not TCP and had ethernet adapters consisting of two multibus cards and those lovely vampires.
I still remember the arguments I had with others about buying an NRM rather than winchester disks for the MDS systems. Some, at the time, thought that ethernet could never work.
It was so long ago that HD were bigger than 8 inch and held about 35 MB and cost about £25k, the removable disk cartridges held 5 MB and were about 20" across.
Somewhere I have the URL for a story I read about a Chicago Commodity Futures trader who screwed up and ending up getting several tens of thousands of tons of coal delivered.
Whenever I wanted (say) 3 metres of cable, it would arrive from Stores as a 100 metre drum. Stores refused to accept the 97 metres back, so I would find somewhere to store/hide it. Repeat, frequently, over a period of years.
I did hear that when a company I worked for was planning a new building, someone managed to calculate the bricks required by multiplying length x width x height of the building.
The supplier asked how they would like deliveries scheduled, so they said in a couple of weeks would be great. OK, we'll send over the first ten truck loads, but what about the other thousand?
I can see what used to be Ferranti's out of the window. Apparently. I have no idea which bit but everyone goes on about it. There's a blue placque on Wickentree Lane I think.
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