An Exercise In Futility

Before we moved into our new place, we arranged to have a phone line put in (as most people would do). The day we arrived, we plugged in a handset and it worked fine, as expected. This is where the adventure begins. Every now and then the phone would ring, just once, then stop. Sure, the person on the other end could have been hanging up, but it happened quite often. Then sometimes, if the phone rang about 3 times before being picked up, we’d answer it and find ourselves listening to somoene’s answering machine! Then we had reports that people had called us, but some guy named Jay had answered and told them they were nuts for continually dialling the wrong number (which they weren’t doing!). A Telus guy came by yesterday and said he’d had a report (from Jay I imagine) that our line was “call forwarding to his”, which is a silly presumption - the phone man and I both agreed that it sounded like the lines were physically connected. So sure enough, when he went to check at the box down the road, our line had been punched across another block, or something fucked like that, effectively patching our phone line into someone else’s, 3 houses away. What i wonder now is - who got charged when one of us was making long distance calls?…

My trip is over, mostly. My drive from Ontario to BC is complete but i don’t yet have a permanent residence. That may change in a couple of days, or maybe next week, but until then i am working from a temporary “home office” which consists of a friend’s kitchen table, my laptop, and a cat5 cable that disappears into the bowels of his house (the other end of which i assume is plugged into a router somewhere). Whee!