Too bad I didn't have my nifty tool pouch on me

When I was at BYU I worked in the I.T. department for a little over two years, from my sophomore year until I graduated. Our department ran all of the cables for internet and phone all over campus and did all of the installation, upkeep, repair, etc. It was a job that I really liked even though I had to be at work at 7:30 AM (I am NOT a morning person) and crawl in dirty ceilings all day. Everyone was always surprised that girls could do what we did; we got comments about that all the time. In fact in my first interview, my boss made a comment about how the department was predominantly male and asked how I felt about it, like would I be OK in that kind of environment. I said, "I grew up with three older brothers. I think I can handle it."

It was a great place to work and we were always involved in all sorts of shenanigans and hijinks around campus. We also did work on the side, too. Here are a few of my favorite memories:

• Climbing into the manholes around campus to pump out gross, stinky, standing water that was getting close to our cables. That was not a very fun project. We had to wear thigh-high rubber boots.
• Setting off the fire alarms in the library with the dust we made from drilling, causing the whole building to evacuate.
• One of or work vans had a faulty passenger side window. Whenever you'd try to roll it down, it would make a really loud machine gun sounds. So we'd drive around campus and the dorms, holding the button down, and yelling, scaring all of the nearby pedestrians. Maybe you had to be there for this to be funny, but believe me, it was hilarious.
• Doing cut-overs at 2 in the morning to switch out old equipment for new equipment. It was really fun wandering the empty buildings late at night.
• Getting up on the library roof and seeing all of campus from way up high.
• Being the I.T. support at the football and basketball games. One time I was walking with my co-worker around the bottom floor of the Marriott Center where the locker rooms are, and we passed an older man in a nice suit. He smiled at us and exchanged "hello's" with my co-worker. I thought he looked really familiar but couldn't put my finger on who he was. It was Cecil Samuelson.
• Going to the Malt Shoppe on our breaks for buy one, get one free shakes.
• Crashing two work vehicles. People only knew about one of them...hehe. I'm a terrific driver.

Despite all the fun we had, I really learned a lot while working there. And last night, I got to put my old techie skills to good use. We're turning all of the phone jacks in our house to internet jacks so we can have a hardwired connection in each room instead of relyin gon the wireless router that can barely spit out a signal and cuts our internet speed in half. We bought all of the parts and got to work re-terminating the jacks and putting some RJ45 connectors on the other end of the cables in the basement to plug into the router. (like all those technical words?) It brought back a lot of good memories. It was actually really fun trying to remember how to do everything and showing Jared how to do it. It's not very often that I get to actually teach him stuff.