The phone hadn't rung in a while.
Possibly for weeks, but I hadn't noticed. Much.
Truth be told, the silence was a
relief.
For months answering calls on the
“landline” had felt like fielding fly balls on the moon. The ring
would start and so would the race to find a handset, which might have
been buried in the couch … or in a toy box … or left outside …
in the rain. Even if I found one of the four handsets before the
fourth ring switched the call to voicemail, the dang-gummed thing
wasn't charged.
I would have let the calls go to
voicemail and not worried, but then … Someone (not pointing fingers
at THE KIDS) had unplugged the answering machine. And SOMEONE ELSE
(yours truly) didn't bother to investigate the problem or at least
try to plug it back into the outlet.
If it's really important, I told
myself, they'll call the cell phone. Honestly all we're missing
without the home phone are wrong numbers, robocalls … and …
Oh. Yeah ... doctors' offices.
Inertia has it's price.
Showing up for a “bumped”
appointment wasn't that costly.
Someone else in the practice could fit me without rescheduling, so it
wasn't a total loss. But it did prompt me to move some heavy
furniture, relocate a warren of gnarly dust pookas and try to solve
the problem of the non-working answering machine once and for all.
Not that I was successful.
Someone (not pointing fingers at THE
DOG) had chewed through the wire.
But even that wasn't the whole of the
problem. One trip to a big box store, four new phones and one new
answering machine later and someone (giving all the credit here to
THE MAN) emerged from the basement, scratched his head and
exclaimed:“There's no dial tone. Did you cancel the service?”
Wishful thinking.
Three days later … when he (VERY
REASONABLY) asked if I'd called the phone company to sort the whole
thing out … I looked at him, cocked my head to the left and
growled.
More wishful thinking.
I will call. I will call. I will call.
Which I did -- two days after that –
fully expecting to rearrange one day, five weeks from now, so I might
wait for a technician to arrive somewhere between the hours of 8 a.m.
and 5 p.m.
What I didn't expect was a return phone
call – five minutes later – telling me the problem had been fixed
from their office. At no charge.
Really?
Really.
Why did I ever want to get rid of the
landline? I asked myself. How on Earth could I have seen it as a
nuisance?
The home phone is communal. It's part
of the family conversation. With it (and numerous extensions) I can
be assured that at some point in my children's forthcoming teenage
courtships I will know who's calling. I might even be able to glean
what they're saying.
Cell phones don't tether as easily to
apron strings.
And with that, my new love of the
landline is rekindled.
“Oh, by the way,” I mention to my
husband in passing. “The phone is fixed. The problem was on their
end. They fixed it remotely.”
For a moment he is silently stunned, as
I will be when words finally tumble out of his mouth.
“Perhaps we should just get rid of
the landline,” he says as I wait for the punchline.
“Seriously? The easiest problem ever
fixed in the history of things that need fixing around here and you
want to get rid of it?”
More silence.
“Who said that? Wasn't me. Must have
been the dog. I was over here just minding my own business, chewing
on the telephone book.”
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