Tag Archives: phones

In Which My Nose is Roto-Rootered, and I Enjoy A New Phone

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My mobile phone bit the dust a week ago, as a result of being thoroughly Scoutified.

So, after selling my soul to T-Mobile, I picked up a Motorola RAZR and a bluetooth ear thingy. As silly as those bluetooth ear thingys look, I look forward to my next hour-long conference call with the knowledge that I will be able to flap my arms like a duck while listening in.

Also, I’m very excited that I can tap the button on the ear thingy, say “Stacey… STACEY… stacey… STAcey… dammit… STACEY!… staCEY…” for five minutes, and the phone will possibly eventually call her automatically via the miracle of voice recognition. Modern technology is wonderful.

In other exciting modern news, I’m having my nose Roto-Rootered at some un-Dogly hour of the morning on Friday. So, as you start your day that day, take joy in the fact that no one is sticking a sharp slicing implement in your nostril.

The hope is that I’ll come through the other end with a straight septum and the ability to breathe through my right nostril, to say nothing of a distinct lack of eye-popping-pressure in the sinus area. In the meantime, I shall be enjoying a weekend with gauze pads taped to the underside of my nose with a bloodstream full of heavy-duty controlled substances. Anyone need a date to a fancy dinner party somewhere? I’m your man.

I have been extremely excited about this for the past year as I waited for my sick days counter to reset, in anticipation of getting this particular gremlin off my back. But as it draws closer, and I’ve been given my long list of prescription stuff to be filled and detailed and graphically described list of pre and post-op Things To Do, it’s becoming clear that this is not going to be a Pleasant Experience. In fact, it may, and I hate to sound pessimistic, suck more than a little bit.

I take consolation in that I can have my phone and Bluetooth earbud. Should I need something to ease my discomfort during my convalescence, I can simply tap my ear and say “Stacey… STACEY… STAAAAAAAACEY… stacey… STAAAAAAACEEEEEEYYYYYY… dammit.”

Landlines, who needs ’em?

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I’m thinking about ditching DSL and getting Cable Internet, thus allowing us to ditch our landline. The cost of cable internet is equivalent to my DSL right now, or so I recently realized when I saw that our ISP (speedfactory) has starting charging an extra $10/mo because we have computers networked to our router, allowing all to access the internet instead of just one.

The only downside I can think of is updating all those hundreds of official documents out there in the universe that have our home phone number on it.

Anyone else know of a snag?

The Case of the Spooky Phone System

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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.