Showroom cable along Hi Line and Dragon Street.

A showroom fit-out in the 75207 blocks moves lighting circuits, track feeds, dimming controls and the small panel feeders that serve them. MC whips, THHN pulled into conduit and lengths of portable cord are the usual survivors, and they arrive as short cut lengths rather than full reels still banded from the factory.

These buildings were not designed for the loads now placed on them, so a fit-out often includes a service upgrade. That is where larger conductor appears: a new feeder from the meter to the panel, or a three-phase service replacing a single-phase one in a building that grew without one.

Display lighting runs on dedicated circuits and low-voltage control, and the control cable is the part most often left behind when a lighting package changes. Numbered control cable, dimming pairs and the small gauge conductor linking them are all reviewable, provided the ends are labelled or the cores can still be identified.

Keep track heads, drivers and fixtures off the cable list. The desk reviews conductor rather than luminaires, and a pallet holding both is sorted before anything is weighed, which is quicker at the door than after the truck has been loaded and the fixtures have to come back out.

There is almost no dock in the Design District. Deliveries come through roll-up doors onto alleys shared with the next building and a row of parked cars, so a straight truck or a liftgate van is the normal answer and a trailer is usually the wrong vehicle.

Street parking fills early, and a reel walked fifty feet down an alley is a different job from one lifted at a dock. Photographs of the door, the alley and the approach help a collection more than a description of the cable, because they decide the vehicle before the day begins.

• Give the roll-up door width and whether the sill is level with the alley.
• Say whether the alley is one-way, gated or shared with a neighbouring tenant.
• Note the nearest cross street, because several alleys in the district look alike.
• Mention any stair or step between the cable and the door.

Lots here are mixed by nature: partial reels of building wire, offcuts of MC, a coil of control cable and a length of SER from a panel change. Mixed is normal and it is reviewed line by line rather than turned away, but the lines have to be real lines and not one sentence covering four materials.

Sort what can be sorted by family, keep tags with the reels they came from, and photograph the group in daylight. A hundred feet of 12 AWG is worth knowing about; the same coil unlabelled in a pile is only a question, and questions take longer to answer than lists.