Pièce de résistance

This past week we had something really interesting happen near work. An entire block of office buildings lost power. Now usually I would blame it on an over eager backhoe operator.
But this time there was no construction going on. Nor was there bad weather (in fact it was a beautiful early spring like day) and there were no major traffic accidents either.
The outage did not affect us because we had a top of the line building generator, but for those poor souls who did not, it was pure torture.

So, what caused this major outage?

It was none other than your friendly neighborhood squirrel. Yes, a former member of nature’s little speed bumps, took out an entire block of office buildings.
I say former because he got totally fried. Seems that he was out exploring and somehow found his way into a local transformer and decided electrical insulation was his culinary Pièce de résistance

Poor guy.

Believe it or not, this is not the first time this has happened. In fact, some major power outages have be caused by other distance cousins of his.

A squirrel has not once but twice brought down a major trading component of the NASDAQ stock market.

Stray Squirrel Stops Trading

Twice !

For some reason the saying “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice . . .” comes to mind.

I find it amazing that basically the same thing could happen twice to a major component of our financial trading markets. Lets hope they don’t let it happen again.

So this got me wondering if squirrels or other animals have had the same or similar affect on sporting events.
Though I could not find an instance of an entire game or event being canceled due to animal interference, I did find the following . . .

A squirrel stops Yankee / Twins game last year at Target Field.

Then there was the instance where Manu Ginobili actually caught a bat in mid air as it was flying around the arena disrupting basketball play.

But not all interruptions are bad for the animal, or even stop play. In fact this next one is fun to watch, the players did not seem to mind and, as one can see, the dog had tons of fun too! The action really picks up after the 1 minute mark.

Obviously this is not all examples of animals interfering with sports or businesses so if you happen to know of another example and or story and would like to share please do so in the comments.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to enter in our Mutt Madness contest coming up in March!