Laughable phone lines

When the guy from the phone company got a good look at the telephone pole leaning across the corner of our back yard, he laughed out loud. "You should have called this in years ago," he said. My husband pointed out that we did indeed call the phone company to complain about the pole five years ago when we first moved in to this house, but the phone company said that they had just recently fixed a bunch of poles in our area and therefore there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with it.

So PhoneCoGuy did some further investigation and discovered that the phone company had paid a sub-contractor to do those repairs in 2003, but it was clear from the situation on the scene that the repairs had never been done. The only reason we were able to get the phone company to take any interest in the situation right now is that we finally have a renter living in our garage apartment so we need to get a phone line out there, which is more difficult than it sounds given the distance from the house to the garage and the presence of intervening trees.

"I'll tell you what," said PhoneCoGuy. "I'll write on the repair order that this pole is on the ground" (which was not too far from the truth) "and that'll get someone out here to take care of it right away."

Of course, at that time he could not have known that an ice storm would distract the phone company's attention, so three weeks later there's still no phone line to the apartment--but we do have a new telephone pole in our yard and it's not on the ground. It's not even leaning. I don't miss the old pole, and I certainly don't miss the static caused by the old pole's tendency to sway in the wind and scrape the phone line against trees. Next week they're bringing out some new line, so one of these days we'll be fully connected and static-free. No one laughs at my telephone pole!

My septic tank, on the other hand, is kind of amusing.