The 2nd Loneliest Repairman

Over the last weekend, I had a disconnect from the telephone grid. I get both my internet and my telephone from Verizon, but alas, I'm getting ahead of myself, so let me back up and start again.

I was doing some work in my basement where my DSL modem and router are located. I had to move them in order to do some painting. Unfortunately, things got a little pulled as the wires didn't quite reach, but nothing appeared to pull out in the end. The next day, I noticed that I had no phone service. Curiously, the DSL still worked just fine. I went around and checked all the connections, and both the cordless, and the "non-cordless" phone had no dial tone, couldn't dial out, and were otherwise useless. My neighbors are on the newer fiberoptic (FIOS) network, and experienced no outage.

At first, I assumed that it had to be related to the router relocation even though it was only about two feet in the end. I called the phone company and requested a service call. They tested the line, and it was indeterminate- it could be in the house, or further up the line- basically no help. Of course, it was Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, and no one was coming until the Tuesday. While it was refreshing to not have the phone ringing so much, this got real old quickly. Thankfully the cell phone kept me in touch.

I didn't give much hope of getting back connected too soon. Even for a $91 service call if the problem was inside, my "appointment" covered the whole day, and not any specific time. I figured the tech would show up around 4 pm or so.

I was pleasantly surprised when the bucket truck pulled up at 8:30 am on Tuesday morning. He went right to work. I went outside to check on him only to see the truck driving away. I still had no dial tone, so I was wondering if this was break time already. After around 45 minutes he returned, and explained that there was a break in the cable on the main street. Needless to say, it had nothing to do with me moving the router even though I had fixated on that. It turns out that the DSL signal because it travels at a higher frequency than phone can jump over small breaks in the wire that stop the telephone completely, explaining my service enigma.

The tech seemed real excited to have something to fix. He told me he was a "dinosaur" as the network had gone fiberoptic in my area. He has too old to retrain, according to the company, and too young to retire. Therefore, he was more than happy to have some old fashioned copper wires to repair! Next to that Maytag guy, the Verizon copper tech may be the 2nd loneliest guy out there.

In the middle of this, I thought that perhaps I should upgrade to FIOS. However, now that I'm reconnected, things are working fine again, and I think I'll leave well enough alone for now.

--Jonas

BTW: I pay only $17.99 + fees for DSL now, and FIOS Internet starts at $39.99 + fees even with a one year commitment. Yeah it's faster, but I can already stream video ok, so I hardly see the need unless I want to download some more Linux distros...