Working for local Telco, we had a customer that had had phone issues
for several years but phone was almost always usable, just very noisy
and sometimes needed a few goes at getting dial tone or the number
dialed.  Customers phone line was approx 16km pots (2 wire).

My colleague decided to finally bite the bullet and spent several days
repairing multiple faults along the remote16km run, which included
lots of digging very hard desert clay, in the desert heat with flys,
snakes, spiders and spinifex. Customer was ecstatic, saying the phone
had never ever been so good.

The following thunderstorm about a week later blew the phone off the
wall and destroyed much of the cable.

Both colleague and customer heart broken.  Sad customer said to
colleague ... " I think we can just forget about the phone, don't you
think"
--=20
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