"Mark DeBruyn, who serves as our lead support for the entire northern region of the state, was taking a Cisco 4000 to our Morgantown field office, which happens to be on the campus of West Virginia University, for installation. I had already preconfigured the router, so it should have been just a simple plug-and-go situation. Since Murphy's Law runs rampant anywhere at any given time, all did not go as planned. The router was connected properly with known good cables, but no communication existed between Morgantown and our Nitro headquarters. After numerous cable customization attempts and a couple of trips to the local office supply stores, we were still at ground zero. It was late, and Mark and I were thinking more of having a cold beer than a cold console connection."

"While we were tossing possible solutions back and forth between each other, I remembered that I used to test cable pinouts a while back by inserting an unfolded paperclip into each end of the cable then using an ohmmeter to test their continuity. I asked Mark if he could find some paperclips laying around there, straighten them out and use them to insert into the DB25 console port on the router, which was the connector we were missing. Mark quickly created a rollover cable, and using a disassembled RJ-45 connector, he connected the paperclips one at a time as I called out the pin assignments. You have to understand that Mark is a guy with large hands. For him to take the raw materials he had available to him and make such an articulate apparatus such as this without having any of the paperclips touch was an outstanding feat in itself."

"Needless to say, it worked like a charm and he got into the router on the first attempt (if any of the paperclips would have touched, there wouldn't have been any other attempts necessary anyway). The network interface was not bad, it just needed some configuration changes."