phones...

[Catherine Keegan]

At 06:00 AM 1/16/02 +0000, JenPwrote:
>Well, my phone officially died about 10 minutes after I whined about
>it.  Monday morning, I found out that not even the DSL was working,
>so it HAD to be the line, not the phone.  Hubby called Pac Bell from
>work, they said they'd be out Tuesday, and to be home between 8am AND
>9pm.  CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT???????? (er, sorry)  A 13-hour window?

Flashback!  We had nothing but trouble with Pac Bell.  They make the old 
sturdy monopoly look wonderful.  A few years ago, we made the horrible 
mistake of changing our fax/modem line into an ISDN line.  Darn thing would 
suddenly go away and we would have to do the Pac Bell dance.  Luckily or 
perhaps unluckily, Tim was working at home in his guise as a mild-mannered 
consultant so someone was usually there between the dreaded five to ten 
hour span when they would call you and ask you to check now to see if the 
line was up.  I felt rather guilty as the ISDN line was to appease my 
selfish needs for speed.  I was working as a systems programmer in the land 
of the T3 connections and my home Internet experience was incredibly 
frustrating.  Now days, we live in the land of incredibly slow connections 
with no sign of DSL in the future.  Our provider has said we could go 
ISDN.  No!  No!

Cell phones only work in a few areas here.  I used to haul one around when 
I was the oncall and I must admit that I equate cell phones with a 
leash.  Beepers are worse.  When they became the cool thing to have a few 
years ago, I couldn't understand it.  My data center used to send out 
routine "everything is OK" pages during month end.  Being woken up during 
the batch cycle (started around 10 and ended around 6 when the onlines were 
brought up - ah! those were the days before 7x24 became de rigeur) by the 
dancing, buzzing pager to find out that everything was ok....well, I now 
know exactly how hard you can throw that particular model, have the 
batteries go flying all over the kitchen floor and have it still function.

Mendocino is lucky to have a wonderful art center with all sorts of cool 
classes.  Folks from all over the place, but especially the SF bay area, 
come up to take workshops with top-notch artisans.  Watching them try to 
find a place to use their cell phones is part of the fun the locals 
have.  We usually take pity on them and direct them to the highest spot in 
the town where they *might* be able to use their phone.  Personally, I 
always thought the inability to cell phones and pagers was a selling point.

Catherine in California