Classic college dorm room trick, Vin! Thanks for the memories of the good-ole-days of impromptu 10-Base2 networks duct-taped over the door frames.

The coathanger-as-a-locator (Jay In Chicago posted [Link: remotecentral.com]) is extremely useful when you just can't seem to get a reference from one floor to another. Been using that trick since I was a wee-one installing Unico and Space-Pacs for dad.

Every day brings us a new challenges. Today was such a day. We had a three hour window to access the floor of a swanky restaurant in river-north Chicago. A logistics screwup cost us 1.25 of those hours so we were pretty well pressed for time and motivated like all hell.

The subwoofer over the bar got hung and secured, many pairs and quads of 14/2 were run, but the final penetration to the coat/equipment room was not going to be done by a fish.

I try to leave the installing to the installer as much as I can but here and there you either a) want to play with tools or b) are the only one really qualified to do the job. Today it was b).

I'll be honest. I'm six feet tall but I weigh 145. The guys with me are taller and have much slower metabolisms. In other words: I'm a skinny freak and they're tubbos. Obviously, I was elected to crawl over the roughly 25 feet of twisting (commercial) ductwork-inside-soffit and squeak thru some absurdly rough and narrow 1/2" rock tails.

Between you guys and me: it was kinda fun being the ferret in the ceiling for a just a little while. At the very least, now I know I have no claustrophobic hangups.