Locked Out Of My House 2
July 5th, 2009 by ComputerBob
This past Wednesday morning, my DSL Internet connection went down. And when I picked up a phone, I could hear a dial-tone, but I couldn’t make any calls because of constant loud, scratching, bad-connection sounds.
That afternoon, the problem got even worse — my phone line went completely dead, except for a quiet hum. But instead of hearing a message, telling them that my phone was currently out of order, anyone who called me heard my phone ring as though it was working and I was ignoring it.
Yesterday afternoon, a Verizon repair van finally showed up at my house. A repair guy who looked like a high-school kid to me, did a bunch of tests inside of the phone box on the side of the house and then drove off in his van to work on some wiring at some other location. Awhile later, he came back, did some more testing on the side of the house; then went up a ladder to work on the wiring on the telephone poll in the back yard.
To make a long story short, he went up and down his ladder several times, and had to drive to the other location 2 or 3 different times. And he also replaced the telephone line from the telephone poll to my house.
It took him almost 3 hours, but he fixed the problem. I knew it even before he even came to the front door to tell me, because I saw my DSL modem’s lights come on.
A quick test showed that my DSL upload and download speeds are exactly the same as they were before this past Wednesday’s outage — confirmed by Speedtest.net.
Of course, I immediately went online and dealt with 4 days worth of email messages that had piled up. And I’m posting this Journal entry from home, instead of from one of the two undisclosed locations that I had been posting from for the past few days.
It was a huge inconvenience to be without a home phone or DSL for a few days, but I’m hopeful that yesterday’s work will make both of those services more “storm proof” and reliable from now on.
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Consumer Info, Internet, Personal