Unfortunately for excavators not all buried lines are on the map.
They ended up having to dig up the street anyway to fix it.
Sigh. Prison terms please. Even just a month will do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire#Falling-bul...
On the plus side, in the ensuing maelstrom of very excited people, they discovered the segment was a lesser grade than they thought they had contracted.
When he opened the hood, he discovered a happy family of squirrels, and not an inch of ungnawed wire left anywhere in the engine compartment.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
("Mother Earth Motherboard" by Neal Stephenson, 1994)
"Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. [...] The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting."
