Let Me Tell You What I'm Squawking About!

I am so glad to be back after my brief hiatus from the internet! It was a very sad evening on Sunday when the internet stopped working. We were merrily trying to surf the web when suddenly we lost our connection. We thought maybe our router was acting up, so we went to check it out. This was when we discovered that the DSL light on the modem was red instead of green. Red is bad, so I was going to call the phone company and see what was up, but there was no dial tone. If you aren’t familiar with DSL, it comes through the phone line, so when the phone goes out, you lose the internet too. We were trying to figure out what could have gone wrong when we realized that the neighbor across the alley was out building a new fence. Uh oh…

It’s a nice fence, don’t you think?

I think it’s a nice looking fence, and they worked hard on it. I have no ill will against our fence-building neighbor. I know this was an accident. They just wanted to have a nice fence around their back yard! However, I think they might not have noticed this.

Oops!

Hubby called the phone company about getting it fixed, and they said “We can probably have it fixed by Thursday.” WHAT??? But I must have my internet!!! This was upsetting, but what could we do? I wasn’t even too upset about the phone being out, it was the internet I was really going to miss.

The first day without internet was really tough. I had important web surfing things to do! I had big plans! But if I wanted to use the computer, I had to settle for some fun solitaire or free cell. By the end of the day, I had accepted the reality of having to resort to standard Windows games for computer entertainment. Tuesday wasn’t so bad, because I had students that kept me busy, and Wednesday I worked on some stuff around the house that needed to be done. I filled in my free time those days with LOTS of solitaire and free cell.

Today was very exciting, because it was the day we were supposed to get the internet back. I had some students this morning, so that filled up some time, but I spent the rest of my time watching out for the phone company to arrive. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited when they finally showed up.

Once the repair man was done working, he came and told me the scoop. Apparently, our fence building neighbors had not just cut our phone line. They cut a main line underground that provides multiple houses with phone service. We are not the only customers here that haven’t had phone service the last few days. The repair man actually had to run temporary lines between the box in the picture above and another box at the end of the alley to get us up and running. They are very dainty looking wires, and they don’t look all that sturdy. He said they are going to have to send out a construction crew to replace the main line that got broken.

Here are the dainty little orange wires that are providing us with phone and internet right now. The repair guy said he hopes the construction guys get out soon to fix the main line because he’d hate for the temporary ones to get messed up and have us lose our service again. I hope so too.

I’ll feel better when the main line has been fixed, but for now I’m thankful that we’ve got service again!