I also hate RJ.

Wiring up someone's house with CAT-5 ethernet (cabling and jacks for computer networking), and also for a telephone jack from one location to another.

Computer networking I can do pretty much with my eyes closed. I haven't had much experience with telephone jacks and cabling. I had to pick up some jacks and wire to run along the house from Radio Shack, as it was the closest place and bought the necessary parts.

Low and behold, the jack i got had Punchdowns for 6 wires, and the phone cabling had only 4 (which is what i was expecting). And did I mention that the punchdown instructions only told you which colors went where for 6 wires... not the 4 I had in the cable. After about 2 hours of looking like a complete idiot I finally gave up on it for the day.

I get home and look it up and as it turns out that what people normally refer to as RJ-11 actually is not really used anymore. There are three of them. RJ-11, RJ-14, and RJ-25 (4, 6, and 8 wires respectively). The standard for jacks is CAT-3 with 6 punchdowns meant for RJ-14 cabling. It is perfectly able to be used with an RJ-11 cable, but the third line won't work (who cares), and the color coding is different. If it sounds confusing, it is.

Long story short, I printed a matrix of what goes where when using a different style plug from the cable and am going to try to redeem myself in the morning, but it kind of pisses me off that the ultra-confident sales guy at Radio Shack didn't think that I might want to match up the cabling to the plug... most likely he was as clueless as I was.

Oh well, today is a new day and I will (hopefully) make myself look competent again.