Engineers Nightmare as Wasps Find Home in Openreach Socket
One of Openreach’s senior UK broadband and phone engineers, Amjed, recently got the shock of his life while making repairs at a property in Glasgow. Upon removing one of the operator’s copper phone extension sockets from a wall, he came across a wasp’s nest. We assume he must have been investigating a buzzing sound on the line 🙂 .
Admittedly, engineers do sometimes find a sting in the tail with their jobs, and indeed it’s not the first time that flying stingy things (i.e. insects, not politicians, but there are similarities) have become a cause for concern in the telecoms sector. Last year the operator’s engineers in West Cornwall (England) were left buzzing (sorry) after opening the door of a PCP street cabinet to find a hive of busy Bees occupying it (here).
However, most people would probably agree that Bees aren’t nearly as annoying Wasps. The latter tend to adopt a similar behaviour to your average drunken teenagers on a Friday night, albeit with distinctly less vomiting and a lot more stinging. Wasps are, generally, absolute buggers.
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Now admittedly, Wasps do tend to snack on other pest insects (good), produce powerful antibiotics in their venom (also good) and pollinate plants (good again), but we only wish they could do all that without being such total gits about it. Let’s face it, at one time or another, most of us have probably had the ‘chased around the garden while wildly flailing arms’ experience – probably quite a few times. It’s practically a national pass time.
In this case, Amjed wisely beat a hasty retreat and called in some professionals to tackle the problem. As we understand it, the wasps were then “taken care of” and “safely removed from the property“. We assume that translates to mercilessly eradicated and later committed to a suitable fire. Hopefully Openreach didn’t sting the customer with a hefty repair bill. Sorry, again.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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A pun for anyone over 50: They are not wasps, they are Buzz-Bees.
Look at it from the wasps’ point of view – they have been around far longer than we have, and if we invade their territory and provide them with a nice nesting site, they’s be daft not to take advantage of it! 😉
I thought you couldn’t get BeeUnlimited any more?
Great article. And you’re right when you see a Bee fly by you get the feeling he is saying “hey how you doing”. Whereas when you see a Wasp you just know they’re screaming “I am gonna get you”. They are the chavs of the insect world.
Heh. Made me chuckle: thanks!
Buzzing sound on the line. Because they are wasps. *Hysterical laughter*
£3.98 for wasp nest killer powder, job done.
Good job it isn’t on my socket!
Bet he got stung for the visit
This why there taking so long or are they moving so fast you can’t tell
Back when I was a network engineer for VM one of the first faults I ever attended was a bees nest inside a cabinet right by all the line cards. Arranged for a company to relocate them
Give then a spin in a dyson cylinder.
I bet they were just trying to find an old friend Buzby.