A homeowner in Florida had just had fiber-powered internet installed at his home and was returning from a lunch break to discover something quite appalling. His new fiber optic cables were cut, and the perpetrators are, he says, a competitor of the internet company he’s using. More specifically, contractors for CenturyLink had “dug a conduit right through my new T-Mobile Fiber Optic line.” That said, this wasn’t the contractors’ first rodeo.
According to GreatGoatsInHistory, the homeowner’s username on Reddit, “the exact same crew cut the cable internet line to my office 2 weeks ago.” Whether it was carelessness or some sort of corporate deliberation is unknown, but one thing is clear: OP sadly no longer has his luxurious fast wifi, at least until the cables are repaired. In his post on r/mildlyinfuriating, he explained how this team working for CenturyLink had been quite the menace in his neighborhood.
The contractors have been working in the area for weeks. During this time, GreatGoatsInHistory says, “They’ve cut cable lines, power lines (twice that I know of), phone lines, broken fences, cracked a sanitary sewer, and left tred marks and torn sod as far back as 12 feet into yards.” When he confronted them about his severed fiber optic cable, they claimed to have seen the junction box but ignored it, guessing that there wasn’t anything inside. In other words, it was contractor carelessness to a destructive level, and according to one commenter who works in telecom, that excuse doesn’t hold up too well since most buried fiber lines have a tracer wire embedded specifically so crews can find them before they start digging.
Florida Homeowner’s Story Sparks Similar Contractor Horror Stories
“It’s pretty obvious they are an out-of-town contractor that only cares about getting stuff done quickly,” GreatGoatsInHistory wrote, and it wouldn’t be hard to agree. Countless Redditors chimed in in the comments, with several sharing their own horror stories about irresponsible contractors cutting their lines, too. Someone claiming to work for a coax company in Germany says things aren’t much different overseas, calling out the flood of cheap fiber subcontractors who clearly don’t care about the job. Another commenter described a crew in their neighborhood that killed irrigation lines, gas lines, and electrical, all while allegedly drinking on the job, and said police eventually had to get involved before the crew was pulled off the project entirely.
“It’s crazy to me that these fiber companies are OK hiring these jokers who make their Fiber brands look absolutely awful,” remarked another commenter. A third suggested calling the city about the careless contractors, since they’re seemingly digging around without properly checking for other utilities. “They are going to get themselves killed and possibly cause thousands of dollars in other damages if/when power goes out,” the Redditor remarked. One commenter’s story raised the stakes even further, claiming a fiber crew in Ohio hit a gas line that ended up causing house explosions, though thankfully with no fatalities.
Fortunately, T-Mobile had a crew ready in Florida to repair GreatGoatsInHistory’s fiber line to his home. When asked in the comments for an update, OP summed up the whole ordeal about as perfectly as possible, joking that T-Mobile was sending a crew out at 10am “in retaliation… I mean repair mine.” Still, it’s as one commenter put it: the fact that this happened at all, and keeps happening, is a bad look for cable companies in general.
