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March 6, 2005
This is the operator, how may I annoy you?
Sometime yesterday we lost dial-tone in the house. I called Qwest and they came out at some point to fix it. They discovered (they claim, and I have no reason to disbelieve them) two bad pair in the house - which they disconnected to restore service. They also charged me $85 for the house-call - and left two dead jacks in the house.
Naturally, those were the master bedroom and my office, where the DSL comes in.
So I called the builder to talk about getting it fixed (and reimbursed for the $85 service call) and then went out to the NI (network interface, for all you telco-impared types, it's the box on your house where the phone services comes in from the pole or street) and switched the carrier pair to those two jacks to see if the entire cable run was bad, or just the blue pair. Both jacks worked on the secondary pair, so I'm back in the phone and broadband business, and $85 poorer.
Speaking of broadband, on the 28th of February Comcast left a hanger on the door saying they'd be burying my cable in the next 14 days. The various utilities have been coming 'round painting cable paths on the ground. If I cared enough, and if Dawnise hadn't taken the camera, I'd go take pictures - just in case I ever need to know where the power runs under the street and into the house.
With any luck, by the time I get back from CA, I'll be in the cable modem business, and I can tell Qwest to take their P.O.S. ActionTec DSL modem back. (Gotta reboot the damn thing nearly daily, and it takes a good 5 minutes to sync up and authenticate - it already gotten annoying.)
Posted by dberger at March 6, 2005 2:39 PM