For 18 months, people in the Welsh village of Aberhosan lost their broadband signal at 7 every morning. No one could figure it out. Engineers at BT Openreach - the privatized engineering spinoff from BT - undertook multiple steps, including replacing cabling to the village.

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Finally, after a year and a half, they figured it out.

One of the villagers had an old TV set they'd switch on every day at 7. The faulty TV would blast out a single high-level impulse noise (SHINE) that knocked out broadband for the whole village.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180

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You might think the quirkiest thing about this story is the broken TV and its mortified owner, but you'd be wrong. The most amazing thing here is the BT Openreach, literally the worst company in the world, solved a single, solitary problem, even if it did take them 18 months.

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Seriously: if BT Openreach was a satirical comedy about technical incompetence, poor back-end support, buck-passing, jobsworthing, and pure sadism, it would be cancelled midway through the first series for being so broad than no one could suspend their disbelief.

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But I didn't post this merely to note the amusing busted TV or to remind everyone that BT Openreach should be shoved into a lead-lined pit, sealed with 200m of concrete, and the whole thing signposted MENE MENE TECKEL UPHARISIN.

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Mostly I posted it because I wanted an excuse to relay the funniest everything-stops-working-every-day-at-the-same-time story I ever heard.

It's Michael Skeet's story, and it comes from the days when he was working at the old CBC Toronto studios on Jarvis St.

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Every night at 9PM, all the equipment in one of the studios would suddenly lose power and then restart. Then it would happen again every morning at 3AM.

Engineers tore the studio apart, rebuilt key power supply components, etc. Nothing worked.

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Then, one morning at 5AM, the cursed studio had an explosion in its main transformer. When the smoke cleared, the entire studio was spattered with...baked beans.

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Have you figured it out?

I didn't.

The overnight security guard would arrive on shift every night at 9. He would open the main transformer door and put his dinner - a can of beans - on top of the transformer to heat up.

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At 2AM, he'd open the door again to get out his hot beany supper.

The transformer had an automated safety feature: when you opened the door, it cut the power so that you didn't electrocute yourself.

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After YEARS of this, the night watchman forgot to get his beans out, and....BOOM.

Mystery solved!

PS: BT Openreach sucks.

Image:
Arnold Chao
https://www.flickr.com/photos/arnisto/1715332001

CC BY-NC
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

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