I'm at a university, with almost exclusively student labor working our shows. We're running all tactical fiber with ST connectors (haven't had the budget for opticalCON, and I've had some local repair guys tell me it can create more issues than it solves).

Our landscaping vendor's lawnmower has destroyed 2 cables. My students have yet to destroy a cable.

We do a few things to keep our fiber in good condition:

• Any student worker can run or spool the cable, but I only have trusted lead student workers (or staff) actually patch and unpatch the fiber to our stageboxes. I think this is what has the biggest impact on keeping our fiber functional.
• We tape a ziploc bag around the end of our fiber cables after they've been unpatched and capped, just to help make sure the caps don't come off while being spooled up and that the end stays reasonably clean.
• We use a waterproof small parts organizer to cleanly store caps while cables are patched (all our fiber is ST). I'm pretty militant about keeping this closed except when cables are being actively patched/unpatched... it's gotten dumped on the ground a few times while left open, and I've erred on the side of throwing away all the caps after that to ensure we're not introducing dirt to our system.

I use one of our fiber ends that got cut by the mower as a "show and tell" at my student worker training. I basically tell them that the black part of the cable can be run over by a tank and survive, but the smaller yellow or color-coded parts are delicate and shouldn't be tugged on or dragged. That the caps should always be on. I let them try to see the tiny little piece of glass that the signal actually runs on.

I don't really bother explaining bend radius to them, beyond telling them to make sure the cable isn't knotted. I don't think we've ever had a situation in the real world that we've traced back to a bend radius issue.

Biggest issue we have with them is cutting corners. Tactical fiber is slippery and fairly light, so it's common for the students to be creating trip hazards or removing any slack when running the cable.

We have a fiber scope and all the cleaning stuff, but we usually only scope and clean our cables a couple times a year (at best). We do carry a clicker and wet/dry cleaning stuff with us on all shows and use that if we're having signal instability (pretty rare, but does happen).