Oi. Long day.

[theweaselking]

My client's New York office got a graphic demonstration of Sysadmin Wilderness Survival Practices, today.

(For those who don't get the joke immediately: The most important survival tool a system administrator can EVER bring into the woods is a 6-foot length of coax cable.

If you ever get hurt, or lost, or lonely, you dig a hole and bury the cable. Then you wait 10 minutes and ask the backhoe driver for a lift back into town.)

Comments

[mckenzee.livejournal.com]

As a part-time, on-call, emergency, fiber optic repairman, this joke ruins my weekend.

My favorite was when we got to the hospital construction site and they had cut the protective underground fiber ducts into neat eight-foot lengths and stacked it by the fence. AT&T said it was OK, no one thought to ask Time-Warner, Sprint, or Level 3.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

I used to take phone calls for a cable/phone line location service. Nobody ever called more than an hour before they meant to start digging.

[jaundicedaye.livejournal.com]

Years ago the T1 line where I worked was cut by a gardener with a weed whacker. Whoever installed it forgot conduit.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Ahh, backhoe fade.

The backhoe operator we used to hire for occasional work a while back had, over the time of his employment, cut:
A water main (twice)
A phone line (four times)
A power line (technically he just tore it down)
A gas line (almost)

It got to the point that the phone repair crews ordered him to carry a length of coax around his neck, lest he forget to CHECK THE FUCKING CABLE LOCATIONS. Following the last incident, he was heard yelling "don't tell them it was me" as he fled into the woods before the arrival of the phone repair truck.

Why did we keep hiring him, you ask? Because in the local boonies, he was the only one in feasible distance.