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Letters: Stringing Ability Pays Off

Dear Sirs,

It turns out my stringing talents have paid off!

Being on a Navy ship in the ocean, we don’t really go around storms, we just tie everything down and trudge on through. Well, if you have ever tried to tie down half-inch cable, it isn’t easy—unless you are an MRT. I found myself tying starting knots around the tie-offs that we had been using, and sure enough, I seemed to be the only one able to get a knot that held on that thick stuff.

The most recent thing is when we were running some LAN cable through a passageway. The “stuffing tubes” were tremendously full (we generally just run a new wire and leave the other “retired in place”). This caused a bit of concern as the only somewhat free tube was located behind a pipe with a large amount of insulation around it, making it impossible to get a shot into the hole.

But since the other side of the tube was free, and being the talented stringer that I am, I grabbed the ballpoint pen from my assistant’s pocket, unscrewed it and pulled it apart. He thought I was crazy when I told him I was going to use the pen to feed the cable. Then I knocked the pen into the hole and used the pen as a pathfinder awl. Bingo, it worked like a charm.

Thanks to my stringing abilities, I’ve become known as the “MacGyver” of our work center.

Russ Bruns
Ladson, S.C.

From the June 2008 issue
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