Bugging Senator Mary Landrieu’s telephones by clowns…wearing big clown shoes…and driving tiny clown cars. Sheesh!

I spent my night’s sleep thinking over this aspect. And laughing in my sleep. The sheer stupidity of the comedic act these clowns put on!

Let me explain.

1. The phone company never, ever shows up first to tell you that you have a problem. The phone company is always the last group of folks to know. Believe me, you have to call them, not the other way around.

2. The phone company doesn’t have anything to do with the phone wiring inside a building. The phone company typically only deals with the outside wiring. Inside wiring is typically handled by one’s own on-staff telecommunications folks, or contracted to a 3rd party. And that would rarely ever be the local phone company. Dozens of private concerns make this kind of technology their bread and butter business, but rarely those old-line bureaucratic Ma Bell phone companies.

3. And the most important clue to the Senator’s staff that something stunk in Denmark? These clowns were dressed wrong!

Seriously, these clowns must have watched Robert Redford in that 30 year old movie "3 Days of the Condor" too many times. Redford plays a CIA analyst who once worked a summer for a telephone company. In order to find out who in the CIA is after him, he dresses up with a toolbelt, a vest and a hardhat and sneaks into a building to hookup his equipment to the building’s telephone switching system.

Please understand me here. The folks at the phone company who wear stuff like a toolbelt, a vest and a hardhat are folks who work outside!

Nobody, and I mean nobody who as a techie and works inside wears that stuff! We wear nicely pressed Docker khakis and shined loafers with tassels on them.

You know, business casual. Sheesh!

We don’t wear toolbelts! We don’t wear green fluorescent vests! And we certainly never, ever wear fookin’ hardhats. That’s stuff worn by those outside guys (and gals) who climb fookin’ telephone poles!

Us inside guys (and gals) look pretty much like all the other organization’s employees wearing the standard corporate uniform of business casual.

4. These clowns had zero chance of actually being successful in tapping the Senator’s (or her staff’s) phones.

Let me show you exactly what I mean. Here are 2 images of typical wiring closets: wiring closet 1 and wiring closet 2.

In any typical wiring closet, there are usually hundreds, sometimes even thousands of phone and data wiring connections. As you can see from those images, the wiring connnects are not marked with a big red sign and pointer stating "Senator Landrieu’s Phone Line Here!".

Instead, the wiring "distribution frame" or "wiring panel" has a set of numbers running across each row of connection points and a second set of numbers/letters running down along side each row of connection points. A specific phone line or data line connection might therefore be something like Row 11 – Port 3 on that wiring panel.

It is a must that a good telecommunications staff keeps their wiring closet lists current and up-to-date. In a building with hundreds and probably thousands of phone lines and data lines, there is no other way to keep track of the miles and miles of wiring, and what wire goes to what office/cubicle.

At the office/cubicle end, most places I’ve seen use a combination voice/data connector. It’s a little plastic square with input ports for plugging in an RJ11 jack for voice, and an RJ45 jack (the ethernet cable) for data.

Again, in order for the telecommunication folks to keep track of the hundreds, if not thousands of office/cubicle end wiring connections, it has been my experience that they also mark/label those connection blocks at the office/cubicle end. They simply have to do this! There is no other manageable way to keep track of the miles and miles of building wiring for voice and data.

So in a typical organization, that connector is marked/labeled something like V6-195/D6-013 where the "6" is something like the 6th floor, and the other numbers represent either the voice or data wiring numbering linked to a chart that associates that number with a specific connection at the other end on the wiring panel.

To make my long story short…or at least not too much longer *g*, there is no way those clowns at Senator Landrieu’s office could have known or even detected which phone line at the office/cubicle end matched up with the connection in the wiring/phone closet.

No fookin’ way!

At least not unless they had that chart/listing the telecommunications staff kept, and where the hell would they get their hands on that?

No fookin’ way!

5. And lastly, while it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to learn the skills necessary on how to crimp wiring for voice/data lines, it still takes some modicum level of skill, knowledge and the proper tools. Even if these clowns had the appropriate toolset, I saw zero indication that they had backgrounds where they might have acquired the wiring skill or knowledge. And this isn’t just something one learns from the back of a cereal box.

In any event, I got a big laugh out of the Village People uniform these clowns were wearing. They really had zero clue!

O’Keefe & Co. must have been summa cum laude graduates of the G. Gordon Libby School of Democratic Bugging.

Shorter school motto: “If you’re caught bugging a Democrat, you pass!”