Wireless World

I’ve been a longtime customer of Oceanic Time Warner Cable and Roadrunner Internet. My house is completely wired for it, and in the last year I also started using its home telephone service. The other day I received a panicked call from my mom on her cell phone. She explained that our home phone was down and let me know in case I wanted to call her. I said I would check into it when I got home.

Sure enough, the home phone wasn’t working, so I called Oceanic customer support using my cell phone, of course. I had to go through the phone maze of recorded choices when finally given the option of a call back instead of waiting on the line. So I recorded my call-back number only to realize I gave them my home phone number. Darn it if I was going to go all the way back through the system just to rerecord my cell number.

As I contemplated what I was going to do, the home phone suddenly rang. I answered it and it was Oceanic customer support calling me back. They asked what the problem was, I replied, “Uh, my phone doesn’t work.” There was a long pause and the tech then said, “Aren’t we speaking over the phone right now?” I explained that I guess the problem was intermittent, so he then took me through several steps to troubleshoot the system.

The last step was that I had to reboot the system, but that meant the call between the tech and me would be disconnected. So I hung up and rebooted the system. The phone didn’t work again. That’s when I looked down and saw that our puppy, Buddy, was chewing on the telephone wire going to the wall jack. That explained why the phone was going in and out. Although I had taken precautions to prevent him from chewing electrical wires, I forgot about the phone line.

Just then I heard my wife shriek from the bedroom, “Buddy, you chewed the cord on my curling iron!”

Buddy looked up at me and I at him, and I said, “You’re on your own!”