Hi, My name is Matt Hunden and I live in Chicago's Loop. I work in one of the dozens of skyscrapers that line the streets of this city. Each day, I take the elevator down to my building's lobby, get my cup of coffee at Starbuck's (nothing fancy, just black, no cream, no sugar, no caramel) and walk about two blocks to the office building where I am in charge of structured cabling. Chicago is a hub for many things; and one of the most important is the fact that it is a communications hub for the Midwest. Data lines from all over the country connect near the Loop and that is one reason that companies like to be located here, especially data centers, because of the network infrastructure that is physically located here. My job is to make sure that the offices in our building have access to the fastest and least-troublesome cabling network so that the tenants are happy and the employees can complete their jobs efficiently. This means that the systems that are located behind the walls and in the ceilings of this building are optimized for speed and capacity. There is nothing more frustrating to a tenant than having to deal with communications' inefficiencies and that leads to problems in productivity and employee morale. It is hard to imagine that a building's management and maintenance staff can have control over something as intangible as employee morale, but it is something that we have to deal with every day on one level or another. So we spend quite a lot of time improving the quality and quantity of cabling in our building to make sure that our tenants have the very best we can provide so that they can do their jobs. Sometimes it is an adventure; more often than not, though it is a systematic redesign and reinstallation of cabling designs that worked for the last tenant, but not for the current one. In an office building of over 60 floors and thousands of workstations, there is much to be done here.
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