Last night Stacey tells me she couldn’t get either the computer in the spare bedroom nor the computer in the basement to get a dial tone, but the kitchen phone worked fine.

I had wired the basement line at the same junction that goes to the bedroom line, so I figured I’d made the connection loose somehow and the wires had fallen out or something. But it hadn’t.

So why would the bedroom and basement jacks not be working where the rest of the jacks in the house did?

Since moving into the house 3 months ago, we had given up DSL for economy. We were back in the dial up business after a 4 year hiatus. When I went out to buy a modem for my machine and installed it, it hyped how you could receive calls while staying on line. It even had answering machine software. I thought, wow, dial-up has come a long way, because once I’d installed it and logged on, we discovered we could place a call out using our only phone, the kitchen phone! No modem noise on the line! (What should have been our first clue is in italics).

The second clue is, I tried calling our house to test out the answering machine software, and it wouldn’t answer the line!

The third clue is that the back bedroom had been an office for the previous owners of the house.

For those of you much quicker on the uptake than I, you’ve realized that there was a second line in the house that had been left active by the previous owners, and had finally been shut off yesterday.

So, dial-up has gotten even suckier, because we can’t use the landline while we’re online, as we thought we could before. *sigh*

But a big thanks to the previous owners, John and Janet Hagye, for giving us 3 months of a free extra line, even though we didn’t know it at the time.