Is this another change a lightbulb joke?

[carly_sullivan]

A few weeks ago, the local electric company installed new poles for supporting overhead wires, all through the neighborhood. Shortly after one was installed in front of our house, our basement started to puddle up with unpleasant looking water. A plumber was called. Plumber put an auger in the main waste line, the three inch diameter pipe that

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[alpha_strike]

A contractor installing street lights in a residential neighborhood for a city that shall remain nameless used a boring machine to install the electrical conduits. Something was wrong with their depth gauge, so instead of digging at 40 inches, they dug at about twice that depth. They dug under the sidewalk for several blocks.

Fast forward a year. Homeowners began having constant problems with their main lines. Eventually, a plumber sent a camera down one of the sewers and discovered that a 2" electrical conduit went perpendicularly through the exact center of the homeowner's 4" main drain. Well, *everyone's* sewer was bored through and partially blocked, or broken.

This kind of thing happens more often than you'd think. Precisely locating buried objects is fairly difficult. Contractors and homeowners are supposed to file plans when things change, but they never do. The county maps say that my septic tank is in the neighbor's yard west of my house. It isn't.

When the gas company told me that they needed to replace the gas line to my meter, I stayed home so I could show them where the septic tank *really* is. They would have replaced it after trenching through it with their giant digging machine, but I wanted to be able to shower and stuff when they were done.

Almost all shovel-leaning is a consequence of waiting for somebody else to do something -- I fix traffic signals, not water mains -- or waiting for equipment, or waiting while somebody else waits for equipment.