When I left college in 2000 I got a summer job working as a "technician". I knew next to nothing about telecoms, and was told by the agency to say I was an apprentice electrician. I told the site foreman straight that I had no idea what I was doing and he took pity on me. The other guys were all in their 60's having recently retired from BT and making a small fortune as contractors in the .com boom installing networks. They decided having a young squirt run up and down the switchroom all day  pulling cables while they sat on the cable drums at either end terminating cables gave them an easy life and decided kept me on for the rest of the summer going all over the UK and even to France, Holland and Ireland. We had one job where lifting all the floor tiles in the switchroom was impossible so we gaffa taped about 60 coax cables to my boot and I crawled the length of the building with cables in tow.    By the end of the summer I decided not to go to Uni and carried on. I pinched some manuals and learned about SDH networks and managed to blag another job in the offices at Marconi. Its all downhill from there really 🙂  ... View more