Trygve.Com > Diary > "on the move (part 1)"
moving Nyx Net from Boulder to the treehouse

Trygve's digital diary /
March 25th, 2000

"on the move (part 1)"

the Nyxbilly Hillbillies?
t1 lines across the driveway

Impressive, huh?

Well, maybe they don't look like much, but these two cables represent years of struggle, strife, and at least three more words beginning with 'S.' Yep, here they are, fresh from US West, the T-1 lines to the treehouse. The original install date was around Thanksgiving of 1999 and from November on, they were always due to be installed within two weeks or less--usually up until a day or two before the putative turn-on date, at which point the date got bumped about two weeks or so.

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All this despite the fact that Nyx's lease at the Boulder location was up at the end of January, 2000, and then the building was to be remodelled and the new tenant was scheduled to move in on March first.

Pointing out details like this was an effective way of mobilizing US West's staff of highly trained excuse invention staff who would invent new and imaginitive reasons for why they hadn't bothered to show up on schedule (or inform anyone that they weren't going to show up).

Back of the Portmaster at Nyx/Boulder

A few weeks after someone else was supposed to be occupying the space (but was still being kind enough to let Nyx linger a little longer), in the midst of dealing with the chaos surrounding the premiere and subsequent "sneak peek" theater run at the Paramount, US West contractors showed up unexpectedly, claimed to have knowlege of only one of the T-1 lines (which one? the channelized or the frame-relay? they didn't know), and proclaimed that they couldn't install the lines after all because I didn't have a trench for the cables already dug and waiting for them.

Where was the trench supposed to be? If I dug a trench (I offered to get a pickaxe and do one right then) when would they actually lay the cables?

I didn't successfully extract details like that from them; I was told that US West was a great company, but that I'm expecting too much from them. Humph.

T-1s or no T-1s, we had to get started moving anyway. We began by moving out nonessential equipment, furniture, files, and the accumulation of donated hardware that was still in Boulder.

Darlene says: move that stuff!
loading nonessential Nyx equipment

I don't know why this picture looks so much to me like it should be in a Bloom County strip, but it does--and I'm not even wearing my "Bill the Cat" t-shirt.

Eventually, on the date that we'd said that complaints would be filed with both the Public Utilities Commission and the management of Qwest (with the merger/buyout in process at the time) the US West installers showed up and, after being firmly and repeatedly disabused of their conviction that they needed to do all the interior wiring in my house before they could get started on actually getting T-1 service brought out here, they did finally install the cables.

Driving under the T1 cables
Don't forget to park your drive heads

Even though I didn't have a trench waiting for them--though they complained mightily about that.

Not, of course, that the lines actually *worked* at that point, but that part of the story will have to wait for part 2.

here's looking at you
Trygve's Digital Diary
the base of the tree