We had another telephone outage starting yesterday afternoon, which, of course, meant we had an internet outage as well. We've been having more frequent problems with our land line for about a year now, and since it's gotten serviced, reliability has actually gotten worse. The sad story lies below the orange princess phone...
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I suppose it's a greater challenge to the phone company to provide service to their rural customers, such as us, than it is for them to provide service to their more urban customers. Rural customers are spread across greater distances, and maintaining all those lines for so few people has to involve a lot of work. But you'd think after decades of providing such service that they'd have the whole thing down. If what we've experienced over the past year is any indication, this is not the case.
We have experienced a series of phone service outages over the past year. After placing a call to Verizon, and attempting communication with that infernal computer, after a couple days, a lineman would appear and perform some kind of repair. Sometimes, the problem has been between the pole and the house; this wasn't hard to understand as our phone line hung through the branches of a couple trees, making it vulnerable to being damaged by them. Sometimes the problem was located in the house; this is also unsurprising as it's not clear that the phone lines in the house have been updated since the house was built 50 yeas ago. However, no matter what sort of repair was done, one or two months later, the line would go out again.
Last February, at the coldest possible time, the line went out. That time, the problem was in the the line to the house. The lineman said that the above-ground line would ultimately have to go underground; however, this wasn't going to happen in February, with several feet of snow on the frozen ground. So he laid a new cable on the ground, over the snow, to connect to the house, with the understanding that a new underground line would replace it sometime after the thaw came.
After that, the phone line went out twice. Both times were due to problems inside the house. The second time this happened, a few weeks ago, the lineman decided to install a new switch box in a different location from the old one in order to avoid a hard-to-get-to part of the old interior line. This required him to splice the line laid on the ground back in February. (Note: the thaw came a couple months ago, but as yet there has been no detectable effort to bury the phone line.) So, of course, the lineman placed the splice in...the rhododendron! I suppose he put it there so it wouldn't get lost, but it's a bit unprotected in that location.
Since this repair, we have lost phone service twice, most recently yesterday. Both outages occurred during a heavy rain. And, minutes after loss of phone service, a State Trooper has pulled into the driveway. Apparently, in these situations, the line automatically sends out an incomplete 911 call. Interestingly, all I had to say to the troopers was "It's Verizon," and they both smiled with deep understanding.
So the lineman is due to show up yet again tomorrow. The immediately problem of interruption of service has cleared up on its own, but there's the larger problem that causes the outage problem--this unburied line, with an exposed splice, lying on the ground--that needs to be addressed. I hope that once this larger problem is fixed, we'll have more reliable phone service. But I'm not betting on it. It's Verizon.
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May 19, 2015
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