Wherein I rant about copper thieves

You've read about these assholes.

They break into places and snag copper, often from something that's using the copper for a purpose - like an electrical line.

They've gotten on BART tracks and done daring thefts (sometimes successful, sometimes tragic). They've broken into utilities. They've gone into anything with a wire to snag the copper and resell it as scrap for money.

Not long ago, these asswipes hit phone lines a few blocks from where I live, causing my landline to crap out.

Yes, I still have a landline. I use it mainly for my DSL connection (I don't care for Comcast, the cable option, and don't have other options immediately-available).

Less than a day later, the phone folks got everything back together, but I managed to chat with some of the maintenance guys to find out that the outage was due to some asshole or assholes scaling a telephone pole and cutting out a section of copper cable.

Seriously.

The daring nature of this boggles my mind, especially when I did the math and realized the perps had to do this in daylight, or at least dawn, based on when my outage began.

Next time I hope the fucker who tries this touches a live wire and gets cooked.