Spiders have an awkward habit of getting pretty much everywhere imaginable, which is probably down to their deep connection to the web. But spare a thought for one of Openreach’s UK broadband engineers in the Staffordshire village of Hixon who, while working on top of a telecoms pole, had to do a bit of extra debugging after opening up a cable box to find this surprise.
Over the years we’ve seen plenty of animal and insect related damage occurring on UK broadband networks, from swarms of Bees or Wasps occupying street cabinets (here), to Badgers blocking access to cable ducts, and hungry Rodents chewing through vital optical fibre cables (here). Nature certainly has an endless box of surprises for the budding engineer, and today is no different.
According to Openreach, one of their Patch Lead’s, Mark, had a little surprise during a coaching session. He came across this eight-legged “friend” who’d set up shop at the top of a pole in Hixon, Staffordshire. Clearly the spider didn’t realise that Halloween had already passed and instead left the engineer with a touch of extra bug-testing to perform.
Nothing a good hoover can’t resolve, of course, although Openreach are clearly being a bit more PR sensitive to this particular guest than our household would be to such issues. But each to their own, we just hope the little thing got a chance to check their webmail before being disconnected. And with that, I was out of spider puns. But then, this is what happens when you spend too much time on the web. Ok.. enough.
A Spokesperson for Openreach said:
“Our eight-legged friends are super important to the UK’s ecosystem, providing a tasty snack for lots of birds and lizards. They’re also pros at pest control! This reduces the need for pesticides and helps maintain ecological balance.
But our spidey friends are having a rough time, with their numbers dropping due to habitat loss and changes. So, when we’re working on our network, we always keep a lookout for them and keep them safe. It’s a tiny thing we can do that makes a big difference to our local environment.”