« Unconventional Valentines | Main | Deep thoughts..... »
February 18, 2006
Small World
Yesterday morning I picked up my phone to call work, and discovered my line was dead. This is an annoyance I've become used to in the time I've lived in this apartment, it seems like everytime it rains hard my jack goes dead. I quickly switched the phone from the bedroom jack to the kitchen jack, and still no dial tone. Luckily I had gotten myself a prepaid cell phone for my road trips last Christmas, so I grabbed that and called work, then the phone company. The girl at the customer service desk assured me that I would have my phone back by that night, but when I returned home after ten hours of work my phone was still out.
A loud knock on my door about 9:30 this morning jarred me from my sleep, I looked out and saw the phone company truck in the parking lot, so I threw on my yoga pants and a sweatshirt and let the repair man in. He'd already checked outside, and determined the problem must be on my end of it. After cutting through the mess of wires that is my phone line and finding where it comes into the building he still couldn't find the problem, so he went back outside to do more checking. He returned, fussed over the wires some more, went back outside mumbling something about maybe they'd moved some wires around. Several minutes passed and he returned with a second tech, and they continued puzzling over my wires. We were talking about the snow outside, and I mentioned that I was from Minnesota, and the second tech said "really, I'm from Minnesota." So I asked where in Minnesota he was from and he answered "Duluth". I told him I'd spent most of my life about 90 miles from Duluth, when I told him which towns I'd lived in he answered with a very Minnesotan "ah, da Range" and I knew he wasn't lyin'! The first tech asked me how I'd decided to move to Cookeville, and I told him I'd picked it off the map, which most people find hard to believe (it was a little more of an educated choice than just throwing a dart, but still the same effect). The second tech said he'd found it on the Internet, and had been here just over a year. So while the first tech rewired a new jack for me (after discovering one of the wires in my line was dead and that my kitchen jack was not too far from dying of corrosion anyway) we chatted about the contrast of life in Minnesota to life in Tennessee, and the places we both knew.
(P.S. If you've been calling and not getting an answer, my phone is back in service now.)
Posted by Anna at February 18, 2006 2:01 PM