[techtalk] OT: This takes the cake

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 11:48:02AM -0400 or thereabouts, Kath wrote:
> Out of boredom, I take a little ride, going past my school.  Guess 
> what I see? They are putting new windows in the area where the T1 
> line enters our school building.  They UNHOOKED the T1 line and left 
> it dangling from a nearby telephone pole.  Actually I surely hope it 
> was unhooked and not cut.  These construction workers have cut the 
> fiber optic runs inside the building prior to this over the summer.  
> Oi vey :\

It could be worse than fibre-optics. Imagine this scenario:

Workmen doing work on university campus. Holes everywhere. Cables
exposed in holes everywhere. New cables to be installed lying about
on ground.

Foreman: "Go and cut that cable over there".
Foreman is referring to one of the new ones lying on the ground.
Workman sees "over there" and a cable in a hole. That cable is an
electrical one, and it's live.
Workman takes hacksaw to it.
Hacksaw blade vaporises.
Workman survives.
Safety officer, not unnaturally, investigates, makes several changes
to procedures in the fervent prayer it never happens again, and keeps 
remainder of hacksaw framed on the wall in his office as an Awful
Warning to people tempted to whinge about health and safety laws.

I have another story about builders which oddly enough comes from
the same university. They didn't understand why the computer centre
needed notice before they started the heavy work right outside the
room with the finance department data on the disk, and started early
so the computer centre were caught on the hop. Bye-bye, disk. The
vibration was apparently intense enough to cause the disk to die. I
presume the heads jumped and then did the dive into the disk that
produces the nasty score marks on dead disks that crop up on pictures
on the net.

This is a weird question, I know, but if anyone has experience of
seeing/hearing this happen -- what happens? Can you hear it? I would 
presume you can hear something is very wrong. Or not? 

Telsa