Wouldn't It Just Be Easier to Work at Burger King?

Seriously. Stealing a manhole cover is one thing. Deplorable, yes, shortsighted yes, but understandable. Pull up three and you have enough money to get drunk for a weekend. But this?

LONDON (Reuters) - Police in central England are hunting for a badly scorched would-be copper power cable thief after finding a hacksaw embedded in an 11,000 volt power cable Saturday night.

The thief apparently also left a lit blowtorch at the scene. If he died on the spot, would the power company have been liable? More importantly, do you think a picture of the hacksaw is already hanging up on somebody's wall?

"The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone," said Phil Wilson, customer operations manager with local power company Central Networks.

Well, apparently not. We'll probably have to post additional warning labels somewhere.

"At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper... We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and were dragged away by an accomplice."

You know what they say: "friends help you move; real friends haul away your corpse after you've been fried by an 11,000 volt mainline".