Life time employment (at a firm) and cable installation for a new office

I was born and raised in ex-socialist economy, earned my
first degree in an engineering university built by Russians.
My parents are junior civil servants, that is they had iron
rice bowls. At home, I was taught to be listen to teachers,
loyal to boss and those are values. At college, I was trained
to believe that the role of a university level trained engineer
is to seek government job, climb up the ladder to become
a technocrat. That was how it started, those were backbones
of my work ethics. Later, when local universities were forced
to shut down for some reasons, for I did not have enough
money to study with credit transfer to foreign universities,
I had to seek full time work in private firms start flourishing
in my country early 90s. That was why I earned my system
engineer certification before earning college degree. However,
this is not what I want to talk about. So I started as a PC guy,
a technician in a local technology firm headed by natives who
came back from United States after working for big firms like
TI, Seagate, etc.. So I assembled PC, installed DOS 6.22 and
bad old Window OSes, user support, etc.. Next I moved up
food chain, becoming a LAN network technician. Looking back,
I was happy with my monthly salary which now I can make in
less than a fraction of an hour now. But back then, I thought
I would go back college when reopened to earn the degree,
then will make career with that firm. All was perfect, I was
employed, learning while some of my friends were sitting idly.

But simple experience I learned at work changed my concept
about life time employment and life long learning for mobility.
I was installing a switch box for LAN and PABX for a foreign
owned local firm in newly built plaza in the business district.
So I was learning how to crimp RJ 11 (phone plugs), RJ 45
(Ethernet plugs) and will mount servers into the rack, and
PABX, etc.. There structured cabling was installed.

There I learned about decoupling ploy in cabling scheme.
The decoupling is made there so that let's say Mr. X has
phone extension #117, he sits in a table close to network
plug #0102 and he belonged in an Ethernet switch #3,
if he got moved to another room, he will still be able to
use same phone extension, his PC connected to different
network plug #0304 but his PC network card would still
connected to same port in the same Ethernet switch #3.
Being an electronic engineer, who loves to decouple all
sub systems I love it. Another thing I noticed is that
there were extra phone plugs there.

That was useful when a sales guy quit and if he was with
a direct telephone line connected to his desk, to make
sure that incoming phone calls to him will be answered
by his replacement. That is what was called redundency
and that was another excellent concept in engineering.
All those may not be needed for better network switches
and PABXes, but I was talking about LAN networking
in a low income country which is not even qualified as
an emerging economies and we were using PABX (PBX)
from OEM manufacturer from the far Eastern Asia.

But what stuck in my mind was that people move about
and they do move out. As business owner and manager,
you have to think even before you move into the office
premise, but as an employee one has to be prepared for
such career moves in professional life. After all middle
managers and executives are also employees, even owner
in a public corporation is still an agent for stock holders.

So that was the epoch for life long journey of learning and
upward mobility.