Electricity doesn't know what colours the cables are.
How very true.
What follows is a true story, I know this is true as I was one of the participants. A site we are involved with provides internet access to it's tenants with a leased line, loads of fibre, switches in each building, and finally copper to each office. All the tenant needs to do is program their router and plug it in. It's slightly complicated in that there are several outfits involved.
Sometimes the sockets aren't where the tenant wants their service, and this particular tenant had their server room at the other side of the suite. It's impossible to cater for this when fitting out a building full of large empty rooms which the tenants later build their spaces into. So a long cable was provided and run under the false floor.
The "techie" for this particular tenant couldn't get his firewall to work, and assumed the cable was wired wrong - so he cut the plug off one end and rewired it as a crossover cable. Actually, I have a vague memory of him deciding it was wrong before he tried it. It didn't work. After some to-ing and fro-ing, a 4 way conference call was setup - myself, the customer techie, the people who manage the switches (and so have visibility of port status etc), and the customer's support people (they use outsourced management for the firewall - from a very large and well known computer/IT company not related to HAL). 3 of us were trying hard to be patient with the customer techie - as requested he found an inline coupler, and a crossover ethernet cable (to undo the crossover he'd made in the supplied cable). In reply to his support people, he said something like "it's yellow, is that the right one ?".
The answer he got back, that the rest of us wanted to give, was "I don't care what f***ing colour it is as long as it's a crossover cable". That seemed to put the techie in his place, he plugged it in, and it worked. He felt suitably chastened and was left to rewire the long cable as it had originally been supplied.
