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This has certainly been an interesting week for service outages with both Apple and RIM struggling to keep their services afloat. Virgin Media has to take the biscuit this week though, due to no fault of their own.
A rat took a liking to some fibre-optic cables that fed parts of Scotland including three Fife towns. The rodents chewed right through the cables cutting off phone, broadband and cable TV services. What makes it worse is that after the Virgin engineers had been out to fix up the gnawed cables, the little pests came back for another taste meaning a second cable blackout had to be fixed. Virgin have said that extra precautions have been taken this time to prevent the little bastards from chewing the cables — lets hope that means a little fried rat will be available at sometime in the near future. [Macworld UK]
Image credit: Oleg Kozlov/Shutterstock
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Would have been funky if the ‘extra precautions have been taken this time to prevent the little bastards from chewing the cables’ line was an official quote from Virgin.
They were pretty frank about it, but not quite that frank. Normally you just get the ‘service outage’ descriptor, but this time they actually told us what it was. Makes me think better of them, honestly.
This was reported in our local press with the tasteful headline “Rat kills virgin in Kirkcaldy!”
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1104396/heidline.jpeg
Excellent Headline, Bravo Local Rag!
Incredible!
I thought modern cables were designed to taste unpleasant to vermin, to discourage this or do they deep fry them in Scotland like everything else.
No, they’re electrified to stun the rats. Then we collect them and deep fry them; Never order a black pudding supper in Fife.
haha, amazing, fife getting comments on gizmodo!! never though i would see the day,
and red puddings are wayyyy better
It’s hardly surprising to see comments about Fife on Gizmodo.
They’ve been going on about iOS Fife for ages.
Ahahaha
I have had my mind completely blown by gizmodo on an alarmingly frequent basis. Physics, technology, space travel – I read stories on all these subjects in utter amazement. So rather shamefully I’ll admit that it has taken a story about filthy rats in my home town to spur me to register a username so I can comment…. But come on, KDY on Gizmodo, thats f*cking huge!
Haha you deserve a thumb’s up for that!
Well, thank you!
So not the whole of Scotland then just three towns in Fife, strange headline.