phone home

I'm enjoying the quiet that comes from the telephone not ringing. Our land line has a short in the wire. I know because this happened the first time about 3 weeks ago. Chris called the phone company (on his cell phone, of course) and they sent someone out and he found a short in the outside wires and one on the inside. He fixed it and it was fine for a week, but then it stopped working again. This time we have put off calling them back, mostly out of laziness. I wanted the house cleaner than it's present state if he was going to have to come in the house again. Last time, I cleaned up the common areas, but my room was messier than I would have liked it to be. So, I cleaned it after he left and pretended that's how it looked when he was there.

I was joking to Chris that our phone problems are probably from bad Karma, because we have annoying answering machine messages. Our current one is a recording of the operator saying, "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try your call again. If you need help, please hang up and dial the operator." Then it does that annoying beeping. It really is a recording of what plays when you leave the phone off the hook. Ravenna left the phone off the hook and timed how long it took the recording to come on, and then started our answering machine recording at that time.

I was thinking maybe someone reported our line as being disconnected and so the phone company really did disconnect it. But, no, it's a short in the wire. Our wiring is so old in the house that we had to have an adapter in the bedroom to plug in a regular phone. It has a really old outlet, that is more like an electrical outlet, but with 4 skinny holes. I don't think I've ever even seen a phone with that kind of wire/plug whatever you call it. I would google it and post a picture here, if I was more ambitous.

When one person called and got the answering machine, they just figured they had dialed wrong, so they called back, which was fine, because it took us that long to find the phone anyway.

Anyone we really want to contact us has our cell phone numbers or e-mail address anyway, I think.
I'm not really anxious to pay my phone bill this month though. Maybe we could live without it and save $35/month.
Naw, then Ravenna would hog my cell phone, or worse, want one of her own!!! That time will come, but not yet. Not quite, yet.