Swimming in the Pensieve

Don’t give me any grief over this, because the present situation with the phone lines is giving me more than my government-mandated ration of grief as it is. OK?

Pardon me while I pseudo-pout
When we moved into this house, it was fairly apparent that I was going to have to wire-in phone jacks, because we had loop pairs coming out from under the base boards in almost every room. No biggie…until I discovered that every cable, leading up to those base boards locations, had been severed under the house. We have one phone jack in the house that works, and it’s in the kitchen.

Moreover, we have DSL service; which requires that I hang one of those cheesey ‘Y’ adapters from the one working phone jack; to provide a point of attachment for both the phone (with its DC-14KHz bandpass filter) and the DSL modem. It ain’t cuttin’ it, folks. Unbeknownst to us, it has been a matter of EITHER the DSL working, OR the phone working.

Since the Internet connection is a nearly unlimited demand commodity in this house, I definitely know it when that’s not working; so I dash over to the aforementioned ‘Y’ adapter and wiggle and jiggle it until we have connectivity again. Since the phone is an infrequent demand commodity in this house, I rarely know it when that’s not working…until I pick up the phone and discover that we have no dial tone. I then wiggle the ‘Y’ adapter until I get a dial tone, make my call and everything’s fine…until I discover that the DSL isn’t working.Got DSL back. No phone. Wiggle-jiggle. Got phone back. No DSL.

Then somebody opens up the cabinet door, smashing the door face into the phone jack/’Y’ adapter abomination, and we’re out BOTH phone and DSL. Hydrophobia-like symptoms then manifest themselves. Wiggle-jiggle.

No. Really! This is fun!

Sorry folks
The DSL is more important, so I disconnected that abomination of a wiggle-jiggle-toggled-double-pole-double-throw-switch-with-a-center-off-position, masquerading as a ‘Y’ adapter, and plugged-in the DSL modem directly to the only functioning phone jack we have. We’re down to DSL and cell phone only.

It’s nice to have the cell as a fallback…were I to actually remember to plug the darn thing in to charge every now and then. (Note to self: Rechargeable Batteries carry a clue as to their proper operation by their very appellation!) *Must not slam head repeatedly against the edge of the desk.*

It’ll be fully-charged in a couple of hours. Sorry ’bout that.

Yes. I will crawl around, under the house, and get those jacks wired-up as soon as I can spare the time; but, that’s the trick…finding the day or two it’s going to take to straighten-out that mess under there. Until then, we’re down to email, carrier pigeon and off-peak cell.