I got a call from one of my regular customers a couple of months ago. Her husband had been trimming back the hedge with electric clippers and had managed to chop a cable where it dropped down the pole to a splice.
They only live two minutes walk from here, so I went round to take a look. Fortunately, it was was only about a 6-pair cable running to a few houses at the end of the road; if he'd hit one of the other drops he'd have cut off the whole road, including himself. Unfortunately, he's one of those people whose first reaction to anything he does wrong is to blame somebody else:
"Shouldn't have put their &@#!%& cable in such as %^!@&* stupid place!"
I managed to get his wife to convince him that being nice to the BT engineer when he showed up would make the repair job much smoother (as would offering cups of coffee, etc. of course!).
Luckily, the cut was relatively close to the splice and there was sufficient slack, so the repair was an easy one-man job only taking a short time. They didn't get billed.
Even the "big guys" get it wrong somtimes. A couple of summers ago road contractors chopped through two 100-pair cables between here and the C.O.
