Imagine not feeling in control of anything and just swinging in the breeze. That's been the bulk of my life since pregnancy. But today I had a near meltdown at the end of our move. We're 98.6% done, which is good. We've only got to get a bicycle, make sure our storage spaces are empty and pick up the vacuums and carpet cleaner AFTER we finish cleaning the old apartment tomorrow. Probably only 1 car worth of stuff and then we're done...at the old place. Great.
Over here, different story. We're just beginning, and I've barely any energy to get stuff out of the boxes and into places. The place is made like Fort Knox, where if you break in, you're trapped because you need a key to get out of every door even from the outside - sort of seems like some type of fire code would prevent that. What's your opinion about that? So everytime we need to go someplace, we've got to find our keys! There's not adequate lighting to get back to my office at night time either. Then some aggressive jayhawk type bird did a drive-by on me and squawked at me to get out of the way as I tried to walk back to the house from my office. He didn't appreciate me being in his way and made a lot of noise to deter me from going toward my own house! A BB gun is looking very appealing at this point. I haven't seen this type of bird aggression since my friend Carla's bird used to dive-bomb me for fun in their house because it sensed my fear.
But here's the capper: we've had no internet or phone for several days here, and I demolished the internet setup at the old place. But one day, I noticed ringing coming from my vacant office as I walked through the yard with the dogs (who don't yet understand the concept of yard freedom - they still need to be virtually 'walked' in the yard!)
It turns out the house was wired for two lines. And AT&T didn't choose to just turn on the line (I sort of asked them to - I was only keeping them because it was supposed to be faster and easier to keep things as they were) that was most recently in use. It had only been off for a week before ours got turned on. Wouldn't it make sense to use whatever the last configuration was? No, instead they revive a defunct line that hadn't been used in 4 or so years that only went to the office. So no jacks in the house as far as I could see and definitely not the jack that the previous home owner had hardwired under the garage to the office so that there was a hard-wired land lined internet connection out there, not relying on a wireless router to broadcast that far. He'd left me his modem and everything.
So finally after a calls to AT&T, 1 disconnection in the middle of the escalated phone call (which wasn't returned by the rep I was speaking to who knew my phone number because it's on the account) I had to call in again, re-explain to level 1, wait for level 2 again. After a 30 minute wait the 2nd time, I gave up. I called Time Warner to see if I could get phone and/or internet service from them without getting their cable and asked 1)how much and 2)when they could get out here to install it. The last thing I'd want to do is threaten AT&T with disconnection when it'd take me 2 weeks to get another company to come fix it. Time Warner could do if fairly quickly and charged a very small installation fee - half of what AT&T charged me to flip a switch from the office with no visit to my house, no modem delivered, and not even the correct line activated. I then called AT&T back, got someone who this time put me through to repair. The repair guy said it was something I could do myself easily.
He told me to find a gray box outside of the house and to switch the wires from line 1 to line 2. Sounds easy enough. Problem #1 - we can't find a gray box. Finally we see 3 little gray boxes that have been stucco painted shut and can't tell which is the phone box at first because it doesn't have the testing jacks he said would be inside, probably because it's one of the oldest boxes ever. How old is it? Well, our service is AT&T, but it used to be SBC. Our box said Pacific Bell on the inside! I hadn't even heard about any Bell companies since I was a kid and they got busted up, so you know the box is like 20+ years old.
Problem #2 - He said I'd need a flat-head screwdriver to get the box open. Nope. Needed a hex-shaped ratchet wrench. We go back to the old apt. to get the tools and think that we've gotten it all, including a set of different hex heads. We get back hours later, tired and hungry. We stop to eat, unload the car and find that the ratchet we brought back only has 2 sized in our tool bin. The mystery set must be still in the other apt. Well, nobody's going back for it now. I go to my neighbor's house, the one I met with a 10 week old baby. She's not home - she's on a hot date w/her husband for the first time since the baby's come since her mom just got in town for the first baby visit.
I then go next door to the house w/the for sale sign. I've heard them clattering about, so I thought the house was inhabited, but I get to the porch and look in and the living room is empty, save for the largest xylophone I've ever seen in my life! Turns out also, that house has been split into two units, has a guest unit that's 650 sq. ft and they are trying to sell it for $699,000. Yeah, right. In your dreams. This is totally unrelated to my quest for internet, but it's just interesting. That's why our landlords are renting this place we're in - nobody's going to get what they paid for their house if they bought it while things were inflated. And you're not getting top dollar for the next year at least, so they'd rather rent it and wait for it to re-appreciate, than to sell at a big loss.
Back to my trek. I then go two doors down and meet a nice latino family named Aquino. They lend me a ratchet set. I HATE borrowing and asking for stuff, but this was the perfect type of occasion to borrow a cup of sugar (in the middle of baking) and also, if I don't meet people now when I need something that forces me out my comfort zone, I'd never bother to meet anybody other than the lady with the baby, whom I connected with for obvious reasons.
By the time I get back, Mark has figured out how to get the box open with another type of tool! Now, Problem #3: we look at the box and it looks NOTHING like the tech told me it was going to. But guess what, now it's past business hours and I can't call back. It have been much help anyhow - I wouldn't have gotten my smart, nice guy back and the box was so complicated, he probably couldn't help much over the phone. Instead of just being two parallel sets of similar looking wires to swap, there are maybe 8 sets of posts, with 4 sets of post having something hooked to them. So there are four possible lines in play and I can't tell what's what. To make it worse, some of the posts have 1 wire connected to them, while other have 2 wires connected. Some of them are solid colors, some are double swirled colors. Nothing's parallel or standardized. I just look at the box, it's now dark enough that Mark's got a flashlight and I see myself doing more harm than good.
The phone company's closed. They don't want to fix it anyhow - they want to charge me for someone coming out to switch the lines although they could've done it right from the office. I think they actually do it on purpose - choosing the least used line at a residence - in hopes of having to send out a tech to make money for the 'repair.' Repair my eye. You're not getting one more cent out of me. I paid $40 a connection fee that didn't connect anything I wanted, and plain old telephone service, POTS as they call it, is so outmoded and outdated anyhow. They charge you for caller id, for call waiting, for long distance even w/in your city. After having had cable and VOIP internet phone for the last 4 1/2 years, I was shocked that they hadn't updated their charges to at least throw some stuff in for free, or promising you some jacks.
So now, I'm sort of livid. All weekend with no internet. Okay, I think, plan B. Let me climb up and take the modem the owner left me and move it to my office, and use a wireless router and see if it can make it all the way to the house, and to Mark's room which is the farthest away. I get up and then find that the power cable is pinned behind one of the many shelves they left us, which is somehow immutably, permanently stuff to the wall. Mark and I discovered this earlier last week. So now, I'm really about to lose it. Even Plan B sucks. I'm helpless and useless and can't do anything. The modem was next to a jack that the owner had used, but now that jack was dead. Modem was trapped. What to do?
After trying to use as many anger management methods as possible - I couldn't just go to bed, it was only 6pm! And I had a friend's party to go to, but couldn't see when or where it was with no internet access to the evite. So I was pissed and unable to take my mind off it. I called the property mgmt company to no avail as well. Finally, I sucked it up, called Canada on my cell phone and talked to the former man-of-the-house and asked him how to liberate the shelf and if they'd indeed used that line last (to find out if AT&T was intentionally using the wrong line, now that I was thinking class action lawsuit seemed likely). He told me how to undo the earthquake bracket that held the shelf in place, what his old phone number was (so I can try to call and ream AT&T on Monday - they aren't used to the old and new residents comparing notes) and he was very sorry they'd done that, but absentmindedly said something about Mark's room having a dual line jack someplace that would access BOTH lines of the house.
Got a phone peeped behind things and saw that indeed he has not a dual-lined jack, but a jack with two separate plugs. Tested the lines, hooked up the modem and voila, it sort of worked. I got an error message that AT&T had disabled my access to internet until I tell them the serial number of this modem and registered it, yadda. They'd given me diddley squat in the way of ids and usernames, so I spent an hour on the phone w/a tech lady, registering the modem and so then I at least had wireless internet in the front of the house and 1 phone jack indoors.
But the whle incident had me already bloodthirsty. In addition to wanting to leave AT&T ASAP, vowing to NEVER get an iphone if I have to use AT&T, I also now aspired to be a phone technician and to know how to wire jacks. I'm tired of moving someplace and having this type of thing happen if there was a prior 2nd line. I've worked around it in the past by buying phones with tons of cordless extensions, but I long for plain old telephone jacks. Something I thought I could look forward to with AT&T.
So now, armed w/internet, I looked online and found some DIY explanations. It turns out my phone box has a mix of old wire colors: black/red/yellow/green and newer wires that are swirled blue/orange/etc. So it still looked like a nightmare to try to fix tomorrow at daylight. Then I lucked onto a page that said that most home jacks are already wired for two lines. All you have to do is switch them.
So I went to the kitchen - easiest access - and opened a jack. I didn't see the colors they'd mentioned, but then saw how to translate them, and switched the wires with Mark standing nearby with my scalpel and sponge. I switched them, stuff a phone in the jack and VOILA! I successfully switched a jack inside the house from line 2 to line 1. No technician necessary, and it seems like it's a lot easier than dealing with the tangle of wires in the outdoor box. So, now, it's time for sleep after a hard day.
Winning at something really gave me back something I'd felt I'd lost in my identity since being pregnant: competence. Today I finally had a situation where mind over matter won and it made me feel really quite good. I'm going to sleep very soundly tonight and on Monday, if I can't talk AT&T into just switching the darn lines, I'll work on switching the other 2 questionable jacks myself, knowing that I can!
Hope everyone's having a good Thanksgiving weekend.