Today I went to Laramie and worked with my Dad. My Dad is the foreman for Laramie Telephone Exchange. What he does is wire and set up phones, networks, low voltage electric, satellite, speakers, and all sorts of things. Today we were "fishing wire" through an elementary school. I imagine many of you have some idea of what fishing wire entails, but you have probably never experienced it like we did today. You see, for phone networks, you have to use CAT5 or CAT6 wire for pretty much every phone on the network. If you don't know what one of these wires looks like, take a look at your internet cable. Now, lets say you have 45 phones in a building, you need 45 of those cables. Obviously you don't want to have all that cable cluttering up the place so where do you put it, above the ceiling. That's where fishing comes in. You get a couple of people up on ladders and you give them this fishing tool.

They run the tool across the space where the wires are intended to go and drag a heavy strength ribbon behind. The ribbon is connected to the bundle of wires pulling from the source spools. Today we ran 3 sets of 15 wires, so we had 15 spools going at one time. Our set up was a little different, but it pretty much looked like this.


So, that was my day today. Tomorrow I will go to Laramie and do it again.