Those "WTF?" moments in life

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GNTLGNT

The idiot is IN
Jun 15, 2007
87,651
358,754
62
Cambridge, Ohio
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Autumn Gust

Well-Known Member
Sep 20, 2012
3,360
15,346
It was 7:15 on a weekday morning back in the 1990s. I was sitting at a table on the fourth floor of the Sacramento State library, studying for an eight o'clock exam. The place was deserted and I was half asleep. I looked up when I heard someone come out of the elevator. I stared and thought,"This can't be real… why would Dr. Chuck Tyler be at my college? Why would Dr. Tyler be on the fourth floor of the library at this ungodly hour? Why would Dr. Tyler be here at all? WTF?? Actually, it WAS Richard Van Vleet who played-- you got it-- Dr Chuck Tyler for many years on the soap All My Children. Sleepy and surprised, I could only think of him as his character on the show. Turned out he came here for a while to help his aged parents and to teach a drama class at the college… so I really wasn't hallucinating!

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fljoe0

Cantre Member
Apr 5, 2008
15,859
71,642
62
120 miles S of the Pancake/Waffle line
When construction or digging is going to happen, it's prudent to have a guy come out and mark the underground lines so you don't run a dozer blade or a trencher or something through a gas pipe.

Of course, if the guy comes out going, "Okay, George, I'll mark the lines," and marks them on snow which is going to be melted by midafternoon that day, Im' not sure what good it does.

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I got the crap scared out of me one day. We had a backhoe out digging a hole at a major intersection. I, of course had had the area located for underground cables. One of the guys called me from the job site and said, we just dug up a bunch of cables that look like phone lines. I raced to the site and when I got there what I saw scared me because there was such a large amount of cable we had dug up. I started going around to all the stores in the shopping center where we were digging and everyone still had phone service. After a lot of checking around, we discovered that we had dug up old lines that were not in use anymore.

I can appreciate those photos because the locating system is so bad that those don't surprise me at all. It's better now but it used to be if a locate guy showed up and found nothing he would just leave and you would never know he had been there. Then when you would call to try and find out if the area had been located and you would go through robo answering system hell.
 

Grandpa

Well-Known Member
Mar 2, 2014
9,724
53,642
Colorado
I got the crap scared out of me one day. We had a backhoe out digging a hole at a major intersection. I, of course had had the area located for underground cables. One of the guys called me from the job site and said, we just dug up a bunch of cables that look like phone lines. I raced to the site and when I got there what I saw scared me because there was such a large amount of cable we had dug up. I started going around to all the stores in the shopping center where we were digging and everyone still had phone service. After a lot of checking around, we discovered that we had dug up old lines that were not in use anymore.

I can appreciate those photos because the locating system is so bad that those don't surprise me at all. It's better now but it used to be if a locate guy showed up and found nothing he would just leave and you would never know he had been there. Then when you would call to try and find out if the area had been located and you would go through robo answering system hell.

I could see where that could be really a problem for lines on snow. The snow melts, the lines go away, and the next day the trencher shows up. "No lines! I guess we're clear!"