Dan Purgert wrote in :


Indeed I was only thinking of the -48v nominal / standby voltage,
rather than the 90VAC ring voltage. Been a long time since I've had
to do POTS work. Kinda miss it (well, not the miles of white-orange /
orange pairs).

Then you will probably appreciate this story. I attended a smaller
college in rural Nebraska in the 70s. I spent one summer working for the
Maintenence department doing a little of everything. That included
digging a trench between the Maintenence building that contained the
power access point for that portion of campus (transformers, meters,
etc.) and another classroom building about sixty feet away, so that new
conduit could be put down for the wiring upgrade in that building. We
were digging that trench by hand because of all the other conduit and
cables buried crossing that area. One thing we ran into was a concrete
beam crossing the trench path. When we asked what that was for this is
the answer we got. It seems that the phone company in town also served a
good portion of the surrounding countryside. As such, a rather large
aerial trunk cable came up to the downtown side of campus, then went
underground. On the far side of campus it re-emerged and turned back into
an aerial cable as it served all the customers in that directin from
town. Further info was that there used to be a couple of campus buildings
in the area that were no longer there. When the guys were digging a
trench for some of the wiring we were avoiding, they ran across this
steel conduit running across their trench. When they checked with the
Maintenence manager, he told them that it was probably power lines that
used to go to the now nonexistent buldings, and to get the SawzAll out.
You guessed it. The guy who had been doing the sawing told me that he had
cut through the conduit on one side, and started on the other. He said
there were these funny little pieces of copper falling out of the cut.
About the time he finished the cut and the center chunk fell down, the
maintenence boss came by and said all the phones had stopped working.
When they looked at the end of the conduit they saw a whole lot of ends
of phone wires. Now this was about a three or four inch conduit, so a lot
of wires. I don't know if they were color coded or the old plain paper
wrap, but either way it took a while to get all the wires spliced. After
that had occured they dug out the conduit for about ten feet in each
direction from the trench, and buried it in concrete. Isn't life fun some
times! I can just imagine what the phone guys said when they called this
in. "You did what! Oh my G*d!"