Wires, wires everywhere…They think the problem’s in the wires. Twenty-two hundred feet of wire. *Sigh*
I haven’t been able to announce a winner in our Memory Lane Contest because we’ve been so busy with computer outages, etc. We just had two guys from Verizon here. They’ve just now had to go back up the phone pole; because, having fixed the computer… the blinkin’ phone is dead! Holy moly. Lucky thing I caught them: they were seconds away from leaving. And you can’t call for help when your phone is dead. Hobble, hobble down the sidewalk and hope that you can catch them. Which I did.
Suddenly I feel tremendously tired. And it ain’t over yet.
(Now? Now is it over? They say they’ve fixed it all, we should be out of the woods. Please let it be true.)
I sympathize. I once had a similar problem in my old condo, when I still had a landline phone and a DSL computer connection with AT&T. They pulled a fast one on me and switched me over to one of their satellite systems, which promptly had a wiring problem that knocked out both my computer and my phone. Fortunately, I’d been forced to get a cell phone to keep tabs on my mother some time before this, so at least I had a backup phone not on AT&T. Then, when I moved to where I am now — and I had to go cable and/or wireless because the apartment building had no landline connections — I decided to keep my computer with one company and my phones with a different company, so if one company had an outage I’d still be able to communicate with the outside world. (Neither of them is AT&T, by the way.) True, I don’t have phone capability on my computer, but at least I have email; and I have smartphones so I can still do internet on those.
And if you’re wondering why I have two phones, they’re actually two different lines. One of them is a new number that I chose when I moved and replaced my old flip phone with a smartphone, and the other is a backup smartphone with my old landline number on it, for people who still have that number from before I moved. It’s always good to have a backup. And believe me, I’ve had to use all those backup options at one time or another.
All this phone stuff makes me dizzy.
Years ago, I worked at a place where we had 5 T1 data lines, which are 1.44 M data lines, running over the same wires as are used for conventional “two wire” telephones. The problem was, that the phone system cabling was old and since the utility easement was of questionable validity, they couldn’t replace it.
So, every time it rained, I would lose a couple of those lines. I’d call it in and the tech would have it up in a jiffy, but only because he had put that circuit on another wire pair, and inevitably, they’d fix one line at the expense of one of the other lines. They’d fix circuits 1 & 3, but then circuits 2 & 4 would go out. Usually, as soon as the weather cleared, they’d all work flawlessly, again, until the next heavy rain. Being in the desert, rain was rare, but we sure got walloped when it did rain.
I think they finally got ours right.
Praise God for those who can do things we can’t. I often fantasize what would people do who survive a worldwide event that killed most of the human race. Who would know how to make a flush toilet work, or electricity, or an automobile – or trifocals, antibiotics, or a printing press (how about Kleenex).
Marshmallow peeps might be hard to come by, too.