HOORAY!

My telephones (the old fashioned kind) are fixed!

I can now close this chapter of the "How Many Things Can Go Wrong at Once" book.

While I was in the hospital getting my broken colon fixed, two of our three air conditioners, the pool pump and the telephones quit working. Air conditioning and pool pumps are mighty important in the Texas summer. My telephone lines are critical to my office at home.

One of the air conditioners was fixed before I came home on Tuesday. The second, the one that cools our master bedroom and living room, was replaced and working by Wednesday night. The pool guy replaced the pump on Thursday.

That left the phones.

I have two "land lines" I use regularly - one for work and one for home. They're both on U-verse. Out of the blue, the two lines started acting as one. So if I was on my work line and a call came in on my home line, it terminated the work call. And vice versa.

So imagine being randomly knocked off a high-level conference call, or a call finalizing an IRS audit or a call with the doctor whose time is so precious.

The U-verse technician came on Thursday (the same day I called) and couldn't figure it out. He kept wanting to tie it to some event, but no, the phones have been working fine for over a year. He replaced the modem, tried different configurations, all to no avail. After more than two hours, he gave up and said he would report back that another tech should come out.

Friday I waited and used my cell phone for any call I cared about. Nobody came to fix the house phone problems.

This morning, after another 55 minutes talking to U-verse, we got on the schedule for a second service attempt.

When the tech called this afternoon for better directions, I was skeptical that today would go any better than Thursday. But after about an hour, he used his intuition and tried something. Our home alarm system was wired in to both phone lines. When he disconnected one of the phone lines from the alarm system - voila!

Now why did everything work fine for over a year, and just last week the alarm wiring mattered?

Gremlins, once again!