The Lowe-Down

Sometimes I think the claim of being a ‘lifelong learner’ is just a cover for being too stubborn and proud to ask a professional to do something.

Simple things have a knack for escalating, as I was reminded recently. My most recent experience was triggered by a switch in internet delivery to our home. Having recently been notified of our eligibility for a ‘fibre to the premises’ connection, I arranged for an NBN technician to install the required boxes. The whole process seemed to go very smoothly, and the job was done within a couple of hours. It was only after the technician left that I discovered an error in communication on my part. I won’t bore you with the details. The heart of the problem was that I had a series of cabled ethernet ports wired up throughout the house that now couldn’t be utilized thanks to the fact that a single critical cable was now missing an end!

Necessity is a great teacher, and this was one of those moments when fixing the problem outweighed any desire to leave well enough alone. Learning often starts here: not with lofty aspirations, but with the nagging realization that if you don’t do something, no one else will (at least not for another week).

Faced with this predicament, I considered my options:

• Live with the current setup: Not ideal, given that the internet in our study – a space where we needed reliable coverage – was now worse than before the NBN install.
• Call an electrician: A practical choice, but our electrician was on holiday for a week, and besides, I wasn’t thrilled about paying a call-out fee for what I suspected was a quick job.
• Fix it myself: A slightly daunting option but surely within my grasp. After all, I’m resourceful, and YouTube exists for a reason.

I’m sure you can guess which option I went for.

I’m a capable individual. A ‘life-long learner’. I have access to YouTube. What more could I need? Now just to be clear (and to allay any fears you, the reader, might have at this point) the specific thing I needed to do was wire a termination plug onto the end of an ethernet cable. No power source was involved, and I wasn’t dealing with any live power cables. The worst I could do was lose a bit of cable length if my attempts failed. And so I set out on my learning adventure.

The first step was to sit down and watch a bunch of YouTube videos on how to do the task. It never ceases to amaze me the sheer volume of ‘how to’ YouTube videos that are out there! It restores some of my faith in humanity seeing all these people filming instructional videos purely to be helpful. Obviously, some are promoting a particular business or brand, but the majority are your amateur ‘Jeff the Handyman’ type videos posted purely to help people out. The usefulness or otherwise of these videos was quite varied – some of them were very helpful, some were downright confusing – but in the end, I got the general gist of what I needed to do and what tools I needed to do it.

Here’s a truth about learning: it’s messy. It involves trial and error, frustration, and moments when you question your sanity. Success isn’t a straight line, but a zigzag of wrong turns and small victories that eventually lead you to the finish line. No matter how many “three simple steps” videos you watch, there’s always some nuance, some gap between the “how-to” and the reality in front of you.

Armed with half an idea and a lot of hope, I headed to the hardware store – lifelong learners’ mecca – for supplies.

If you are taking on some sort of DIY task, your local hardware store will always have three versions of what you need – none of which look like what YouTube described. Thankfully, on this trip, I was able to identify the products I needed easily and breezed through the self-serve checkout with an air of confidence – look at me, learning another new skill and nailing it! Life-long learner extraordinaire!

Returning home, I eagerly unpacked my new purchases, gathered my tools, and settled down to “complete this simple task in three easy steps,” as the enthusiastic bloke on YouTube confidently promised. Now for those of you who want to know the particulars of the task that lay before me, I can tell you that I was terminating a CAT6 ethernet cable with an RJ45 plug. I can tell you this thanks to my extensive study (at least half hour of Google searching). I learned terms like ‘fully shielded’ and ‘pass-through connector,’ even if I wasn’t entirely sure what they meant (ok, the pass-through connector was self-evident but ‘fully shielded’ sounds more like a description of an Imperial Star Destroyer, but I’m sure it is important because it said it on the packet).

If you’ve ever pulled apart an ethernet cable before, you’ll know that inside it contains eight wires, each twisted into pairs. My first task was to strip off a length of the outer casing and separate the eight wires, untwisting the pairs into individual lengths. Getting the twisted wires straight was a little tedious but thanks to a handy online tip about using a piece of the previously removed outer casing (thanks, Jeff from YouTube) I got the job done with a minimum of fuss. Things were going well.

The next step threw me for a moment. Each of those wires is color-coded and the critical part of the process was to arrange them in the correct order before sliding them into the plug. There were two challenges to this. The first was that two different wiring patterns get used, and it is important to use the correct one to match whatever is at the other end (which I couldn’t see). This didn’t worry me too much because everything I had seen suggested that wiring pattern B was the most commonly used and I was a safe bet going with that one. And the second challenge? I am partially colour blind! Not ideal when trying to identify the subtle colour stripes on eight thin wires. Now I am a lifelong learner with a learning difficulty. Thankfully, the colours on these wires seemed relatively easy to distinguish if I looked carefully, so I was able to proceed, although I retained a persistent nagging doubt from this point forward.

Here’s where overconfidence became my unlikely ally. Starting with the belief of “How hard can it be?” got me moving. Sure, reality quickly humbled me, but without that initial (and wildly unjustified) confidence, I might never have started at all.

Wires suitably arranged; I proceeded to slide them carefully into the plug. Next, I took out my brand-new crimping tool, slid the plug into the appropriate slot, and squeezed. The result: a completely botched job. The plug made a disconcerting cracking sound, half the wire ends dropped off neatly, while the other half left exposed wire ends poking out in various directions. It did not look like this in Jeff the Handyman’s video. Clearly, I had done something wrong, and the distorted shape of the plug suggested this attempt was beyond redemption. The only thing to do was cut the wire and start again…or call someone. But why would I do that now? I was committed. This was merely a minor setback. Besides, there was no way I was admitting to an electrician that I had completely failed to do what would be the simplest of jobs for them. As I might have mentioned, I have my pride. It was time for me to show some real grit; rise to the challenge; conquer my inner demons; be a better version of myself. This was my time.

And so, I tried again.

And again.

And again.

Five times I stripped, unwound, straightened, ordered, threaded, and crimped those wires.

And five times it didn’t work.

I did get better. The wires went in more readily and the crimping was much neater. But the lights on the tester that were supposed to light up in beautiful numerical succession just kept flashing at me in seemingly random order.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. After five failed attempts I felt like I was going a little insane. There was only one thing left to do. I messaged my son and asked if he had any tips. You see, the beauty of this was that I wasn’t actually asking for help – I was merely being a good father and involving my children, giving them a chance to shine. Besides, I was pretty sure he had done this exact job at work, so he might know what I was doing wrong. Plus, he wouldn’t charge me for any advice he gave. Turns out I was right – about my son, that is. What I wasn’t right about was the order I had the wires in. Remember that I mentioned two different wiring patterns? Apparently, my assumption was incorrect. “Try the other pattern,” he says.

So, I did.

Attempt number six. And it worked!

Eight glorious LEDs lit up on the tester in perfect numerical sequence, and my fists punched the air in triumph.

I had fixed it. Me. All by myself (well, mostly).

At the start of the day, I had no idea how to wire an ethernet cable. By the end of the day, I had mastered it. I had learnt a new skill. Thirty-five years since finishing high school and I’m still learning. That is a life-long learner right there!

Except that I didn’t actually mean for that to happen. I didn’t wake up that morning thinking, ‘What new skill shall I learn today?’ I would have been quite happy if the whole NBN install had gone smoothly and left me with no need to fix any wiring. The only reason I did all that was sheer pig-headedness.

Does this make me a lifelong learner or just a stubborn bloke with too much pride?
And in the end, does it really matter which?