Recap: A construction crew decided to, "hand dig" a 20 foot section of fiber trunk out of the ground.

Part 1

Part 2

$BT - Me

$NOC - Noc Tech

$AEP - Angry Engineer's Partner

$2L - My (at the time) Second Level Manager

At the end of the last tale, I was beat. By this point, I had been up for nearly three days straight. My brain hurt. My soul was crushed. I just wanted to go home and sleep off some comp time.

Sunday evening. The crews had wrapped up their work and everyone was heading home. A nice, freshly minted sidewalk had been installed, all of the fibers had been fusion spliced, OTDR shots had been taken, and [Cell Company Who Shall Not Be Named] confirmed that their towers had come back up.

Thirty minutes from my house, and I get a 911 alert.

Fuck that.

Five minutes later, and I get another 911 alert.

No. Fuck. No.

I could literally see my house when the company phone rang.

$BT - [Telco]. $BT speaking.

(By this point formalities were getting difficult to muster.)

$NOC - Hi $BT, this is the NOC, I've got $AEP on the line.

Please god. I just want to go home. I've got a TV dinner calling my name.

If $AE was Satan, $AEP was Moloch. While $AE was content to just fume like some sort of furious technical demigod, $AEP would not rest until you had sacrificed your first born to the technical demons.

I'm not about that life.

$AEP - $BT are you there?

$BT - Yes, sir. However, I'm coming off another call out-

$AEP - I need you to go to [City 2]. And check [Tower].

City 2 was 2.5 hours away. It was outside my territory. There were three other techs responsible for it.

$BT - Sir, that's outside my territory. What happened to the other techs who actually cover that area?

$AEP - [Tech 1] is on vacation. [Tech 2] called in sick. [Tech 3] isn't available.

Called in sick on a Sunday. Really?

$BT - Sir, [Tech 3] was just at the cut site in [City] helping me test. He should be available. I've been up for almost 72 hours and I don't cover that-

$2L - We don't need excuses from you. Just take care of it.

That was my second level. An ex-Air Force officer who thought he was a Marine.

Why the fuck was he on this call?

Throughout the conversation I had been pulling up the 911 alerts on my laptop. The first one was for a single cell tower being down. The second one was for the same cell tower, as apparently the cell company had alerted us that they had water alarms going off.

$BT - [Cell Company] is saying there's a water alarm and the tower is down. Isn't environmental their issue to solve?

$2L - I'm emailing you the report their tech sent us.

As my company inbox let out a delightful chime, I decided to have a look.

It was definitely our fault.

I floored it, fuming the entire way. All I could think about the entire drive was the stupidity I had witnessed for the past 72 hours. As I pulled up to the site, a new idiocy awaited me.

Necessary side note:

Cell towers typically have fiber backbone. In this case, the fiber was buried. The fiber travels underground, goes through a manhole (basically a hole in the ground with a cover on it that acts as an access point), and then into the tower where it comes up into a patch panel. The patch panel is then used to connect the fibers coming from equipment. [Cell Company] later started adding a pedestal containing a patch panel in between the manhole and the tower, to act as a secondary point of access (and to make changes to assignments simpler), but at the time it was still underground and up into the tower.

Keep this in mind.

You see, [Tech 3] had been called to take care of the issue. And when he arrived, he found a family of mice in the manhole. This is not uncommon in rural areas. Mice like to chew and make nests out of anything they can find, and for some reason glass and insulating material are like mice caviar.

When he opened the manhole and saw the mice scatter into the pipe leading into the tower, he decided to go get a pressure washer out of his truck.

And attach it to the tower water supply.

Side note 2:

That water supply has since been turned off. I still don't know why it was there in the first place. Engineers do the weirdest shit.

He then stuck the hose into the pipe facing the tower and let it got full blast to (as I later found), "Flush the bastards out."

After several minutes of this, and not seeing any mice. He figured it was a job well done. Except that his work had somehow managed to get a nice bit of water into the fucking tower. It wasn't enough to do any real damage, but the sensors on the floor which go off if there is too much humidity were not happy about the actual water floating around.

So [Tech 3] wrote up his incident report (and work order to dispatch a splice crew) just as [Tower Tech] arrived, saw what had happened, and cussed him out to the point that [Tech 3] actually took off in his truck and wasn't heard from for several days. Lucky for me, I had worked with [Tower Tech] previously, so he had requested that I show up if possible.

Which led me to being called out to BFE, fifteen steps from a warm bed and a TV dinner.

Epilogue: It wasn't long after, that I was recruited to work for another company (for a hell of a lot more money), in a bigger city. Lucky for me, my father had always taught me to be prepared so I was honored to act as both tech and janitor that day.

[Tech 3] was eventually let got in a, "surplus." He even had the gall to try and use me as reference to apply to his next job.

With the new company I was working at.

Edit: I have a [Tech 3] spin-off here if anyone is interested in reading it.

Edit 2: Gold! Damn people. Whoever you are, thank-you very much.