Qwestioning my low-voltage sanity

Last night my wife noticed it first: no dial tone on the home number. Work number, fax, and DSL all working fine. The home number had been working earlier — what gives? So, I call Qwest, and after navigating past the young male computer voice and waiting on hold for a few minutes, I speak to an apparently real human. Qwest diagnostics show connectivity all the way to my box, so they schedule a visit from a tech to occur in the morning. In the mean time, I’m to try unplugging the devices, wait five minutes, and plug them back in. If that makes the line come back, call back to cancel the appointment.

So after I hang up, I give their little “take two aspirins and hop on one foot” routine a try, but no joy. My wife shoots several sarcastic remarks about their “Spirit of Service” and the wonderful quiet and solitude for which we so gladly pay.

The next day (today) we wait. And wait. Noon, I call Qwest — yes, they have us on the schedule. In fact, we’re job #2. It’s just that job #1 is taking some time. I’m thinking they must be wiring a new apartment building.

So we wait. Late in the afternoon, the tech arrives. Very friendly guy. Like St. Nick, he gets right to his work. First to the box, then to each handset. He’s certain that one of the end-point devices is creating a short — but no. It’s a short somewhere in the wiring in the house. How could that have happened just yesterday?

Then I remembered.

At one time the house had an intercom by the front door, but it had long since been removed. A sheath of unconnected low-voltage wires sticking out of the wall was all that was left. It was too long to stuff back into the wall, and since we were getting ready to repaint the house, yesterday I cut the wires shorter, wrapped them in electrical tape for good measure, and stuffed the end back into the hole.

Santa fished them back out of the wall, separated them, and *presto* we had a dial-tone in every stocking phone. In cutting the sheath, I had mashed two wires together into an incestuous circuit, not realizing that they were still looped into the live telephone system.

Now I just needed to figure out how to explain this to my wife in a way that made me look like…well, if not exactly a genius, then at least not an imbecile who might have just as easily cashed in my life insurance had I been working with 240.

I should have known. We had something similar happen several months ago. The previous owners of the house had left a TV antenna on the roof, attached to miles of antenna cable that we no longer needed (DirecTV uses yet more wires). A bunch of this cable was hanging from the ceiling in one room, and I directed our handyman to cut it off and stuff the loose ends up into the attic. I didn’t realize that mixed into the bundle were some low-voltage leads. He dutifully clipped these, too. Phones went dead. Our handyman spent the rest of the afternoon up in the suffocating attic matching colors and splicing wires by the light of an Everready flashlight until all four phone lines were back on. Electrical engineering lesson number one: never clip wires unless you know what they carry.

So, after this latest rewiring rectification, I settled down in front of my keyboard to get some work done in my comfort realm: computing.

But the DSL was dead.

And Santa’s sleigh had already passed out of sight.

Just to make sure, I shut down and unplugged everything, waited fifteen minutes, then started everything back up in order. Cisco 678 first — blink, blink, got a link! I’m hopeful now. OK, next comes the firewall, then the switch, then the server and workstations. OK, time to login, and…

No DSL. But the link light on the Cisco is still lit! Slowly scratching my…head.

Time to call Qwest again, I guess. Time to beep-boop-boop my way patiently past Mr. NiceVoice. Time to wait on hold listening to music nobody listens to.

After I explain my problem to the nice lady who finally answers, I learn that she has to transfer me to the DSL department. Time to wait some more and continue to improve my muzak appreciation.

When I finally get hold of a real person in the DSL department and explain what I’ve experienced, he pulls up the status, and guess what? A DSL substation in my neighborhood had just gone out, which had been reported by some of my neighbors already. That explains why I still have a link, but no link.

But what a coincidence, I remarked. How likely is it that you could correct a telephone wiring problem, and have another telephone line in the same house go dead at the same time for a completely unrelated reason?

And here I was all prepped to take the blame for this failure, too.

(written yesterday, while the DSL was still out)