I've had one of our project engineers come and speak to me, Plymouth's traffic control comms run on a load of private copper wire buried in the road between junctions, he's got a job to connect the lot to some 4G routers and bring it into an online hosted system. The building where it currently terminates is being demolished at the end of the April and he's about to go on leave for two weeks, so can I go there and help the Field figure it out?
Well, I was involved in the job to terminate it in that building ten years ago, and unfortunately the copper buried in the street doesn't form the big circle he's drawn on the offer letter. It's a rat's nest, completely undocumented, some of it not even addressed, and going by the database it's been added to since we last saw it. I spoke to the Field engineer (thankfully one of the better ones) and told him we could just disconnect an arm, see what disappears, then go down the link one by one until we know what connects where. Once we get to the end it'll be the last pair of wires and we're sorted.
His response of "well that's what you'd expect Steve" was not what I was hoping to hear. Seems he went to the last site, it had only one pair of wires coming in, and when he disconnected it two sites dropped off. Seems that not only the physical layer is absurd, the network routes via units in a way I'm yet to fathom.
I'm going up on Tuesday, I seriously doubt we'll get the work done, I'd be happy enough just to figure out what we're going to do.
......and George/Georgina is happy too 
