I had pretty much the same when dealing with a BT engineer. Disconnected our Kilostream lines as there was no dial tone!

Your BT engineer checked for dial tone??? Around here they just lop it off regardless.

Notes say that pair x not in use, but some previous contractor had wired something wrongly or not updated notes or whatever.

We had a similar issue just after lockdown. Users were encouraged to clean their desk areas with anti viral products between users. In one site they used rather too much alcohol based hand gel to clean the reception telephone, it managed to dissolve components of the ear piece and internal circuitry.

That stuff is vicious.

I never drink it unless branded alcohol is unavailable.

Several jobs ago the big boss decided getting a telephone sanitizer company in might be a good idea so arranged a demo (he obviously didn't watch Hitchhikers).

The sales droid duly arrived complete with swabs, fancy meter and cleaning kit. He proceeded to swab one of the phones all over, very thoroughly, loaded the swab into the meter and pointed out the very high reading for "contamination".

He then cleaned the phone with their "special" processes and formulas, gave it a cursory wipe with a swab and, wow, the contamination reading was very low.

For some reason he seemed very reluctant to repeat the test with comparable levels of swabbing before and after, and with us just giving the phone a quick swipe with a duster (as our regular cleaners would do).

The result, of course, was one sales droid ejected from the building and the big boss gave up the whole idea.

I'd long wondered what Adams had against telephone sanitisers - I guess it was a popular grift back in the day.

No good turn goes unpunished.

Or unpunched.

But putting the telephone techs on the B-ark might not be the best of ideas. You might miss that one last important call telling you to "hide" because the phone was out...

The other two thirds of [1]Golgafrincham society lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly killed off by a raging disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

[1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans

Like I said,... not to be put on the B-ark if you want to survive...

Not entirely the fault of the phone tech. If you're going to be lazy and bodge terminal data links onto phone circuits in the phone wiring closet, then putting up a clear notice right at the start is the minimal sensible step.

The same thing could have happened in the 2000s if someone had decided to run 10baseT ethernet over 'convenient' phone wiring.

Repurposing telephone cables without clearly labelling what you have done and why. Then blaming the telephone engineer for your own fuck-ip. Great work, Walt.

If it’s not labelled, you haven’t finished the job yet.

《If it’s not labelled, you haven’t finished the job yet.》

l have noticed the worst offenders are wilfully illiterate or just plain illegitimate.

A notice just seems to be a challenge.

A log splitter with a "DANGER: Do not place head in mechanism" warning is almost a guarantee of a decapitation before the paint dries.

Something has to thin the herd to keep the mouthbreathers from procreating.

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry." -- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

GNU Terry Pratchett

That last line reminds me of this quote...

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

... does any telephone tech do this kind of work of his own accord, without an official work order?

Maybe they were new, and hadn't had the initiative beaten out of them yet.

An old technician friend of mine had just started his job. He noticed that some of the patch rooms (the patch panels are generally in their own dedicated rooms) had got messy. So, being the enthusiastic newbie he was, he pointed this out to his boss, and volunteered to come into work on Saturday to tidy some of the rooms..

He got in bright and early on Saturday, and proceeded to rip out cables and placing them tidily, This went well, for the computers..

The problem was the old, analogue, switchboard. To save money, the company had used the same RJ45 sockets, with each phone extension connected via an adaptor. What my friend did not realise was that for the switchboard, each extension was assigned to a specific socket on the telephony panel in the patch room, so to maintain the same extension number, the socket in the room had to be patch to exactly the same socket in the patch room it had been before. My friend did not know this, and so didn't keep a note of what had been plugged in where.

Of course, because the phones had been installed by external contractors, there was no labelling in any of the patch rooms. The sockets on the telephony panel were not even labelled.

So, of course, when he'd finished re connecting all the phones, the extensions were in the wrong offices. He spent the entire weekend ringing all the extensions from his mobile, working out what office the phone was ringing in, and re-patching.

He learned his lesson though. Anytime he did anything like that in the future, he didn't touch the phones. The cables were easily identifiable even if what they were connected to wasn't. They were bright red.