I’m a telecoms engineer (amongst other roles) and have had a phone system in the last two houses, my extended family live outside the UK and we use the phone a lot for overseas calls. When I was living at home with my sister and the cat I had to tidy up at least some of the wires other than the ones going into the CCU (the main bit of a phone system) and fix them to the wall as the cat would pull them out, and he sat there looking smug when I had to fix them and got a shock off 100V ringing voltage…
My mum is currently staying at my house in Ipswich as she is back in England for a bit, but knows better than to move or tidy up stray wires, nor switch off computers left powered up in the stairwell or anything in my room with flashing lights on it “to save electricity”, as that means all the telephones in the house stop working and she can’t use the net!
Often these cables are carrying live calls/data so its not a good idea to shift them, people work from home a lot these days and route office calls through their home networks (I’ve done it for business continuity when the leccy has been switched off at my office in bumpkin land). People expect stuff to be done quickly and test system/labs are often set up at home.
the state of that punchdown block (the wiring in the first pic) is horrendous, all the pairs are misallocated too… wherever that was I’m amazed any of their phones work! Even Openreach’s worst cable monkeys aren’t that bad!
