Post by Chad Johnson

The video below popped up on my LinkedIn feed. Sincerely, directional boring is what got me into networking. Before I was a Solutions Engineer at Cisco, I was a laborer — and eventually a supervisor — on a directional boring crew. Long hours. All manual labor. My first "network" was conduit under a road. What the video doesn't show: the days of prep before that drill head ever touches dirt. Every cable, pipe, and sewer lateral gets spot-holed and located by hand. Then — and only then — you drill. Do some crews skip that part and just send it? Sure. It's a roll of the dice. Best case, the drill head pops out exactly where you planned. Worst case, you hit a high-pressure water main and turn the street into a water park. Turns out both kinds of networking reward the same thing: do the boring prep work, and nobody ever finds out how bad it could've gone.

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