A Tale of Two Phone Jacks

There is a certain phone jack that is more important than any other phone jack in our home. It's the one in the Man's room. Thursday it went belly up. Here's how it went down.

Thanksgiving night the Man comes home and discovers that he is unable to get online. Not a terribly big deal since it was very late. Probably just a glitchy thing. But Friday morning, yours truly was unable to access email. Now things are getting serious.

The first thing we do is check the phone line outside that wraps around the house to the room. Back when Marco was a bad little puppy, one day he was able to not only reach this line, but rip it down and chew it into many tiny bits. We both hoped the current problem was a repeat of that-- the Man fixed it himself in no time flat. But alas no. Marco's "Eating everything he sees" days are long past.

Trying out the kitchen phone into the suspect jack verified that the problem wasn't the computer (big sigh of relief), but the phone jack itself (new sigh of frustration). This problem is more mysterious than a chewed up wire, I'm afraid.

So now we are waiting for the phone company to come out and poke and prod and most likely pull out about two pounds of animal fur mucking up the works. That's my theory anyway.

But let's return to the importance of this jack. It is one overworked fellow! First, it is hooked up to a phone and the answering machine. The loss of the phone is just inconvenient. The loss of the machine is a bit of a relief actually! (I could move it somewhere else in the house but....) The fax machine is also part of the package, but it only gets used in that capacity maybe twice a year, so we can do without it for a little while. No, the big problem comes from the fact that our Internet connection is DSL wed to that jack and that is not going to fly at all!

But here we are all back online and going strong with the "Going to Vermont" laptop in my bedroom. I have to say that I LOVE having this up here. Love it! The Man on the other hand is quite miserable without his #1 procrastinating excuse at his fingertips down in his room. Matter of fact, I'm so in love with this situation (I even have a little desk all set up in here!), that when the jack problem gets all fixed, I'll be very reluctant to give this up. There might be a riot. But for now I'm going to play some cribbage online, maybe waste some time finding cool stuff on Youtube, read a bunch of blogs and then do some shopping. Hurray!