Textbooks treat documentation as a chapter near the back. In ITN 101 we treat it as a habit that starts with a four-cent label.
The rule is simple: label both ends of every cable. Not one end — both. Because the end you can see is never the end you need. You are always standing at the wrong end, in a dim closet, holding a flashlight in your teeth, trying to decide whether the blue one goes to the printer or the camera. A label on the far end does not help you. A label in your hand answers the question.
Students groan at this. It feels like busywork, the networking equivalent of being told to clean your room. Then lab week three arrives, somebody’s link will not come up, and the team with labeled cables finds the fault in ninety seconds while everyone else plays cable roulette.
A label is documentation at the exact point of need, readable without logging into anything. Start there. The diagrams can come later, and they will be accurate, because the labels forced them to be.
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