Damage Report

The eternal battle to maintain our little corners of homeostasis continues.

Unrelatedly, I was kneeling on the sidewalk one afternoon repairing the Cesar Chavez Blvd phone. A guy in a work truck stopped and reversed to the curb next to me.

Guy: Are you homeless?

Me: What?

Guy: Are you homeless?

Me: What does that have to do with anything?

Guy: Are you fixing the phone?

Me: I am fixing the phone. See my toolbox.

Guy: OK, I was worried, the phone has been broken a lot lately.

Me: Thank you for your keeping the phone safe.

Someone tried to drill through this vault door. Like all attempts to break into our phones, this is a stupid thing to do even with the right tools. The consumable parts are going to be worth more than the haul. If the best tool available is a drill, the vault will last longer than the bit. These people breached the outer door but didn’t get access to anything that could move. They did deform the metal enough to prevent the latch from turning, which was annoying. The phone was repaired for about two years, until it needed to be replaced, and then the vault door had to be removed.

A hole saw is the correct tool for making a hole in the vault door. A hole doesn’t help to open the vault, however. The two notches exposed in the center turn the latches, but they were already accessible. They are normally turned with the t-bar, which is not a specialty tool, but they can’t be turned until the latch is unlocked, after which they can be.

The bolt box for the lock is inside the vault door. When the lock bolt is withdrawn from the box, the latch can be turned, disengaging the latch bolts. To remove the vault door without unlocking the latch, these bolts and the rotating part with the bolt box must be detached and retracted.

At least these people had a drill, which is better than the crowbar used in the last attempt. It’s still a depressing apocalyptic situation, desperate people with time in the middle of the night to slowly attack the phone from an exposed position with inadequate tools. Meth makes wild risky schemes seem like a good idea. If you witness someone assaulting a Futel phone, leave the scene and call the phone from a safe location. Maybe they will answer and you can redirect them somewhere else.

But! They also stuffed the coin return. This is the correct way to skim money from payphones, if it’s still 1997. Less income, but clearly comes out better in the cost benefit analysis.

Why do we have to do these damage reports? They make us look bad and this one was totally not our fault. There were two weeks of heavy rain. And the mole people want to use the phone too. For a few days it was “the phone that is used lying down”, but that isn’t accessible. Anyway, it’s back up, nothing to see.