Rome at 56k, the mice gnaw the fiber and the internet goes back to the stone age
A dive into the past for Trastevere, which wakes up in the early 2000s when the internet pages were loaded between a coffee and another with the nice soundtrack of the 56k modem. A few meters from Piazza Trilussa, teams of technicians are stannondo putting the fiber optic network back on its feet after the mice have gnawed on the cables. The internet signal is ‘down’ throughout the Trastevere area and for the lucky ones who manage to access the line it arrives in fits and starts.
“They are the mice that eat everything, gnaw the thread and devour the fiber inside”, tells the coach Giancarlo Gerosi to Corriere, intent on working with Saverio Battisti and other guys on the team, with a bust coming out of the cobblestones. “The main problem is that the signal from time to time risks becoming weaker and weaker”he adds.
A tragedy for those who work from home with the network, especially in recent months when there was no alternative. But rodents don’t live only in Rome. During the last election campaign in Paris the theme is on the agenda like other issues such as garbage, cleaning and decorum. Even the re-elected (and acclaimed) mayor of the Ville Lumière, Anne Hidalgo, is not without criticism for not having completely solved the problem. It had indeed launched a new model of rat-proof garbage can although this solution didn’t quite work.
Same problem in New York where the newly elected mayor Eric Adams will have his problem with rodents which he knows well because when his alcoholic father was in his butcher shop and his mother in other houses as a cleaner, he grew up in a council house in Brooklyn, infested with ‘rats’ . Adams was the only candidate for mayor to talk about this problem in the election campaign and in an interview with the US radio program The Breakfast Club, he even said that would like to place a bucket-shaped trap all over the city that attracts rodents with the smell of food, drowning them in a vinegar solution, also presented on the occasion of the RAT summit in 2019.
Now it will be one challenge also for the new mayor of the capital Roberto Gualtieri, because the problem of mice in Rome is oblivious. In the early 1900s Ernesto Nathan, also just elected mayor of Rome, examining the budget he notices the item ‘offal for cats’, the result of which would have been to hunt mice from the municipal archives. So Nathan removes the voice, from that moment the felines would have to feed only on the captured mice. Here comes the saying ‘There is no tripe for’ cats’.
Certainly there is some for Gualtieri who has 40 million euros to spend within the year for the employment of a thousand operators already included in the plan Loves than to contend with the task of sweeping the streets, removing illegal landfills, sanitizing the bins, taking care of the vertical and horizontal greenery, maintaining the drains and manholes to be able to chase the mice from Rome, like Nathan’s cats of a hundred years ago.
© reserved reproduction