@JP
The staircase is important. We always remember the staircase, and do honor to its sacred memory. Like so many other staircases that have fallen or been buried before it.
Who knows? There might even be a coffee cup on one of those steps, where some past wonk sat and considered life in their own private lonely infinite gray tunnel from hell.
You want to know the funny part? All of those cables are pressure filled with rat poison laced with fiberglass, so if rats start eating into it they get a mouthful of delicious ‘now you die horribly’.
So, when you’re splicing or terminating one of them, you get your hands covered with the stuff. Like, your hands and your arms and your clothes - everything.
And because of the little shards of fiberglass in the goo rubber gloves are useless - they get shredded almost immediately.
So … yeah … basically you get to work on those cables up to the point where your hands swell up like two balloons. Then you get 2 weeks off and they move you to some other operation.
Lots of stories in those tunnels. Lots and lots of stories.