I got the letter the other day. I was elated to learn that Verizon's FIOS, their fiber rollout, would be coming to my house. That means, for what I pay the cable company now for 4Mb down / 384Kb up, I can 15Mb down and 2Mb up from Verizon. Nice.

We were told they'd let us know before they start digging, and give us a phone number, so that we can let them know about any concerns we have -- including wires of our own that we may have installed, such as dog fences and, well, robomower fences.

So, I was a little less than thrilled when I drove to work yesterday, and saw them digging in our neighborhood. No notification or phone number, just a bunch of shovels digging a 4 foot hole for the cable conduit.

The only thing going through my head was that if they cut through my robomower's line, I'm gonna have to mow the lawn myself. That's certainly enough to get anyone worked up.

I threw the car in park, and ran out to talk to them. The first thing I discovered is that none of the workers spoke English. They looked at me funny, then eventually pointed at some guy with an ipod blaring. He appeared to be listening for a bit, but when I stopped, he mumbled somethign about coming back later when the supervisor was there.

I came back over lunch to see how we could work out sparing our robomower's electric fence... they were all eating lunch as I walked up. I got to practice my Spanish -- "Habla Englais?"

I still got the funny looks, but this time they pointed me to some guy sitting in a pickup, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. When he was done on the phone, he was very amicable to the idea that I had concerns about how things would work. Which is an excellent trait for someone taking out the front lawns of an entire neighborhood.

These guys weren't Verizon employees, they were workers contracted by Verizon to lay this conduit. Verizon would come later and lay the actual fiber.

This guy explained in general what all was going to happen, which was a bit too high level for the problem we might be dealing with. He realized I wasn't quite satisfied yet and offered to walk over to our house to take a look. On the way, he explained how they ran conduit underneath the road without digging up the road. Apparently, if you dig a deep hole... say, 6 feet on either side of the road, there's some contraption you can shoot through the dirt. He called it a missle, which you can follow up with the conduit. Interesting. In fact, that's what I said, "Interesting". He said "Right, spending all day digging holes and covering them up, it's real interesting." Heh. Ok.

Anyhow, when we got to my lawn, he pointed out the likely place they'd be digging, and I explained where the wire was and how it worked. We decided the best way to handle it would be to simply mark the wire, which could be done by putting spray paint on the grass.

I asked if the color mattered... he said if I did it with anything other than white or pink, the township would likely get up in arms and have someone out there trying to figure out what was going on... apparently, the township has some elaborate scheme of colors for what represents what. Red represents electrical lines, blue is water lines, orange is sewage, etc etc. Leaving white and pink. And, Verizon had already used white to mark off some other things.

So, I was going to be painting the yard pink. Lovely.

He also said that they were capable of splicing any wire they happened to cut, which works for me.

I was glad to have spoken with him, and raced off to buy a can of pink spray paint. After work, Shana and I worked to mark off the wire (which was hard, as it's really well covered at this point).

Well, the yard is now surrounded by pink. I saw the workers get started this morning, and they appeared to be moving the line that was in their path (which is probably a pain in the butt for them, as it's staked down every few inches). But, I was thrilled to see them moving it, there's no way they would have seen it without the paint we put on it.

With 15-20 minutes of work or so, we'll be able to put the moved cable back, rather than doing the entire area.

Which brings up another point, whenever I get the FIOS installed to my door, I think I'm finally going to have to upgrade, having 802.11b is no longer fast enough to keep up with the Internet connection :-)