I was halfway through a Tuesday morning conference call when the internet vanished without warning, freezing my client's face on the screen and cutting off his voice in the middle of a sentence. Because I worked from home and depended on a stable connection for nearly everything I did, I initially assumed that the provider was experiencing an outage, but when I checked the router and saw the red connection light blinking, I realized something was wrong.
Then I heard a woman's voice outside.
When I looked through the window, I saw Karen, the most aggressive member of our HOA, standing beside my house with a thick black cable in one hand and a pair of red-handled cutters in the other. A utility worker in an orange safety vest stood several feet behind her, looking uncomfortable, while Karen examined the cable as though she had every right in the world to decide what happened to it.
Before I could get outside, she raised the cutters.
“Cut it.”
The worker hesitated.
Karen pointed toward the cable running along the side of my house.
“That cable violates HOA rules.”
Then, apparently deciding that nobody else was willing to act quickly enough for her, she grabbed the cable herself and positioned the cutters around it.
I threw open the door.
“Stop! That's my internet line!”
Karen glanced at me but didn't lower the tool.
“If you had followed the rules,” she snapped, “then you should have removed it yourself.”
“Karen, don't—”
SNAP.
The cable fell onto the grass.
For several seconds, I couldn't even speak, because I had just watched a woman deliberately destroy the connection I needed for work while calmly insisting that she was somehow doing me a favor.
“What the hell did you just do?”
Karen lowered the cutters and looked almost satisfied.
“I enforced HOA regulations.”
“You cut my internet!”
“I removed a violation.”
“You don't own that cable.”
“I don't have to own it. Your property is part of this community, which means you agreed to follow community standards when you moved here.”
I stared at her.
“You think being on the HOA gives you permission to cut utility lines?”
Her expression hardened.
“You were warned.”
“About a cable installed by the internet company!”
“And you ignored the warning.”
The utility worker took a cautious step backward, clearly wanting no part of what was happening.
I pulled out my phone and photographed the severed line.
Karen noticed.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Take pictures. Maybe next time you'll remember that HOA rules apply to you too.”
What Karen didn't understand was that the argument was about to become much bigger than either of us.
I had barely finished calling my internet provider when my phone buzzed with a message from my neighbor, Mark.
My internet just went down. Yours too?
Before I could reply, another message arrived from someone farther down the street.
Anyone else lose Wi-Fi?
Then another.
I walked outside again and found Mark standing in his driveway, staring at his phone.
“My internet just went down,” he said.
“Mine too,” another neighbor called.
Mark looked at Karen, then at the severed cable lying on the grass.
His expression changed.
“Karen, what did you cut?”
Karen lifted her chin.
“That line doesn't belong to the HOA.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
She tightened her grip on the cutters.
“I was enforcing HOA rules.”
By now, several neighbors had come outside, and although Karen had apparently expected me to be the only person inconvenienced by her decision, she was beginning to realize that one cut had affected more than one house.
Mark threw his hands into the air.
“Do you have any idea what you've done?”
Karen's confidence flickered.
“I removed an unauthorized cable.”