Today's photo caption: So close, and yet so very far from the way it should be. 

Welcome back to Tech Service Today's IT Disaster of the Week series where we showcase the ugliest IT environment our technicians ran into this week. 

This week's photo comes from a retail store where most of the network cabling was installed professionally & properly. At least that's what our technician thought until he reached the first workstation location inside the store and found this.

His first reaction was that maybe the wallplate that was once mounted here had been accidentally broken, so someone took the terminated jack, snapped it inside this biscuit-type block, and shoved it inside the gang box in the wall. Unfortunately, once our Technician visited the other workstation/POS locations, he learned that every outlet in the store was installed this way.

I can't fathom why any IT professional would do something like this when they could buy a 10-pack of network wallplates for about the price of a Happy Meal and complete this job both properly and in a much more aesthetically pleasing manner.

I once heard a saying that went something like this: "You can put your shoes in the oven but that don't make them biscuits." I'd like to paraphrase that as our advice concerning this week's IT disaster: "You can put a biscuit jack in the wall, but that don't make it a wallplate."

In other words, don't cut corners just because you don't have the right materials with you. As my father always said: "Do a job right the first time, and you'll never be asked to do it over again."