February 26, 2024 at 1:22 pm

They Were Told Their Wires Were A Tripping Hazard, So They Duct Taped Everything To The Ceiling

by Matthew Gilligan

Source: Reddit/AITA

You’re about to hear from a college kid who is pretty darn clever…

And their story might even give you some good ideas in your office or your dorm room!

Check out what they did.

My cable setup is a tripping hazard? Ok, I’ll put it on the ceiling instead.

“I moved into my university dorm last Saturday.

The wireless internet in my university’s dorms is complete ****, but for the most part it doesn’t matter because each dorm has an Ethernet port for wired internet, which is screaming fast.

Hmmm…

However, while setting up my Xbox, I quickly discovered that the Ethernet port in my room didn’t work. At first I thought it was an issue with my Ethernet switch (a device that allows you to connect multiple devices to Ethernet with only one wall port), but after some help from my dad we realized it was the wall port that didn’t work.

Out of curiosity, we asked the students in the room next to mine if theirs worked. Nope, theirs was broken too. We checked the port in the floor lounge to see if it was an issue with my cables, but nope, that one worked fine.

My roommate emailed maintenance to see if they could help, but they replied that it seemed to be a widespread issue as they had received many reports from multiple buildings about the same problem.

A change of plans…

Since classes didn’t start for a few more days, my roommate and I decided to just hang out in the floor lounge during the day, since the Ethernet there worked, meaning it was actually possible to play online games.

After two days of dragging our whole setups down the hall to another room in the morning and back in the evening (we only have laptops but between power cables and Ethernet cables for both of us, it was a bit of a hassle), I had a dumb idea.

This could work…

I have a really, really long Ethernet cable (like probably 50 feet long). Would it reach from the lounge to our room?

Turns out the answer was yes. It reached with plenty of room to spare. So we set everything up, and we had Ethernet from the lounge in our room. All someone walking by would see was a cable coming out from under the lounge door and disappearing under our door.

Our fun lasted about a day. We came up with the idea at midnight, and late the next afternoon the RA knocked on our door and said we needed to put the cable away because it was a “tripping hazard”. Begrudgingly, we complied.

Time to change it up again!

Later that evening, my roommate had an idea. The issue wasn’t the cable itself, the issue was that running it across the floor created a tripping hazard. So I ran to the store and bought some duct tape.

My initial thought was to tape it down so someone wouldn’t catch their toe on it, but he had a better idea. We had plenty of extra cable, why not tape it to the ceiling?

And that’s exactly what we did, giggling the entire time. Several people on our floor have commented on it, and my friend called it genius. Two days later and we still haven’t heard from the RAs again, so problem solved I guess.

We got rid of their tripping hazard while keeping our internet. No fall out yet, but I’ll update if something changes.”

Check out how Reddit users reacted.

One person said this is just fine…

Source: Reddit/AITA

Another individual said they need to be ready for pushback.

Source: Reddit/AITA

This reader talked about their RA days.

Source: Reddit/AITA

This reader talked about the ’90s.

Source: Reddit/AITA

And this Reddit user doesn’t think this belongs in the “Malicious Compliance” category.

Source: Reddit/AITA

Hey, no complaints yet!

So you might as well just go with it!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.