I was at this doctor's office the day before yesterday installing their DSL connection. In the kit they provide a splitter like the one shown in the picture, so that your existing phone/fax can work alongwith the newly installed DSL. Now the problem was, that the wall outlet into which this connector goes was in one room, and the place where they wanted the fax machine and DSL modem was in another room. In the existing installation, they had a lose cable run in between the two rooms, which went through 2 badly drilled holes in two walls, over a drop ceiling which could not be opened up because it was so old that it had stuck to its support, and more such 'band-aid' type installation work. I was bewildered, I thought and thought but could not come up with a solution. I went to a local store and bought a connector like the one shown, except that in place of the male socket that goes in the wall, it had a 25 ft cable. I was hoping that I will manage to run that cable through the existing installation and have a dual socket in the room I wanted to put the DSL router. I struggled for 15 minutes with help from the medical assistants...with no luck :-(. I was about to give up and call a cable installer when the timid, high-school graduate, medical assistant said..."Can we insert the male socket in the outlet of the DSL modem, and insert the cable that is coming from the other room in one of the female sockets of the splitter?". I would have never thought of doing it, and even now I had my doubts it that would work. I tried to figure out for 5 minutes, drawing the possible way in which the internal wiring of the splitter worked and trying to guess if this solution would work. With no certain answer, I said what the heck, let's just try it. IT WORKED! I felt a little ashamed that my 6 years of technical education had made me so detail oriented and theoretical that I needed 5 minutes to give a hesitant approval to myself to try a simple solution to a simple problem. Its like the other common metaphor that people give...the doctors who have practiced in areas of wide spread disease will suspect even your common cold to have some serious internal complications.
I was at this doctor's office the day before yesterday installing their DSL connection. In the kit they provide a splitter like the one shown in the picture, so that your existing phone/fax can work alongwith the newly installed DSL. Now the problem was, that the wall outlet into which this connector goes was in one room, and the place where they wanted the fax machine and DSL modem was in another room. In the existing installation, they had a lose cable run in between the two rooms, which went through 2 badly drilled holes in two walls, over a drop ceiling which could not be opened up because it was so old that it had stuck to its support, and more such 'band-aid' type installation work. I was bewildered, I thought and thought but could not come up with a solution. I went to a local store and bought a connector like the one shown, except that in place of the male socket that goes in the wall, it had a 25 ft cable. I was hoping that I will manage to run that cable through the existing installation and have a dual socket in the room I wanted to put the DSL router. I struggled for 15 minutes with help from the medical assistants...with no luck :-(. I was about to give up and call a cable installer when the timid, high-school graduate, medical assistant said..."Can we insert the male socket in the outlet of the DSL modem, and insert the cable that is coming from the other room in one of the female sockets of the splitter?". I would have never thought of doing it, and even now I had my doubts it that would work. I tried to figure out for 5 minutes, drawing the possible way in which the internal wiring of the splitter worked and trying to guess if this solution would work. With no certain answer, I said what the heck, let's just try it. IT WORKED! I felt a little ashamed that my 6 years of technical education had made me so detail oriented and theoretical that I needed 5 minutes to give a hesitant approval to myself to try a simple solution to a simple problem. Its like the other common metaphor that people give...the doctors who have practiced in areas of wide spread disease will suspect even your common cold to have some serious internal complications.
2 comments:
This post reminds me of this video I saw on simple design solutions, that are all around us but we fail to see them - i guess partly as you said we are blinded by the little we know...
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