Sapphireblue
Dinosaur Act
We turned off our landline this week.
When we bought our not-really-new-anymore house in summer of 2007 and called to have phone service turned on, we also asked if they could send out a tech to install a new jack for the room that would be my office. The house is 120 years old and lack of phone jacks was but one of its quirks. Turned out, though, that wasn't even the biggest phone-service-related surprise we'd encounter upon moving in.
It seems that someone in our home's long past had decided that the house didn't need a landline, would *never* need a landline, and thus, removed the cabling to the street. This is apparently not supposed to be done without some kind of official decree from the phone company, recorded in triplicate, so our poor Verizon installer, when he discovered this situation, had to call his supervisor to come out so that both of their heads could explode in unison.
Before the afternoon was over, the phone company had stopped traffic on the very busy street outside to run new cabling to our house. For all that effort, we were left with one functioning jack: the new, double-outlet one in my office. All the others in the house had had their wires cut, presumably by the same anti-phone remodeler who took the entire house off the grid at some point.
Having one jack seemed like it would be a bother, but I figured we'd get a multi-phone wireless setup, or a VOIP phone, or something. Meanwhile, the jack in my office let me set up the DSL and a fax machine, and of course we had cell phones, so it was no pressing matter to wire the rest of the house.
Nineteen months later, we still hadn't wired the rest of the house. We give out our cell numbers if someone needs to know how to reach us. When the land line rings, we generally ignore it, much as the phone company has ignored my emails asking what I can do about the multiple daily spoofed-number calls from scammers who claim to be authorized to help me lower my credit card interest rates. The only other people who call me are NARAL, the ACLU, and the local fraternal order of police, all wanting my money. Which is why I hadn't bothered to pick up voice mail messages since, oh, last July. I didn't even know what the number to call to get them was, anymore. I'd used my fax machine about three times in nineteen months---two of them in the first summer we lived here, to finalize the sale of our old house. I don't even need phone service for Internet, as our particular service is no-phone-line DSL.
I guess it took way too long to realize that there was no longer any reason to write a $62.47 check to Verizon every month.
I expected the phone company to flail and thrash about a bit when I called to break the news, and was not disappointed. Got the hard sell about how Verizon would be the only ones who could save my life if I needed to dial 911 really fast on a bad sunspots day, or something. I stood firm, if not a bit bitchy. Where was all this concern about my needs the last time I emailed their fraud department?
It doesn't matter. It's over. Our house is still wired, but we're once again off the grid. Someday it will seem adorably quaint that I thought we needed to be on it.
Update on March 7: Today's mail brought a refund check from Verizon of the credit on our account. The total? Eighty-one cents.
Dinosaur Act
We turned off our landline this week.
When we bought our not-really-new-anymore house in summer of 2007 and called to have phone service turned on, we also asked if they could send out a tech to install a new jack for the room that would be my office. The house is 120 years old and lack of phone jacks was but one of its quirks. Turned out, though, that wasn't even the biggest phone-service-related surprise we'd encounter upon moving in.
It seems that someone in our home's long past had decided that the house didn't need a landline, would *never* need a landline, and thus, removed the cabling to the street. This is apparently not supposed to be done without some kind of official decree from the phone company, recorded in triplicate, so our poor Verizon installer, when he discovered this situation, had to call his supervisor to come out so that both of their heads could explode in unison.
Before the afternoon was over, the phone company had stopped traffic on the very busy street outside to run new cabling to our house. For all that effort, we were left with one functioning jack: the new, double-outlet one in my office. All the others in the house had had their wires cut, presumably by the same anti-phone remodeler who took the entire house off the grid at some point.
Having one jack seemed like it would be a bother, but I figured we'd get a multi-phone wireless setup, or a VOIP phone, or something. Meanwhile, the jack in my office let me set up the DSL and a fax machine, and of course we had cell phones, so it was no pressing matter to wire the rest of the house.
Nineteen months later, we still hadn't wired the rest of the house. We give out our cell numbers if someone needs to know how to reach us. When the land line rings, we generally ignore it, much as the phone company has ignored my emails asking what I can do about the multiple daily spoofed-number calls from scammers who claim to be authorized to help me lower my credit card interest rates. The only other people who call me are NARAL, the ACLU, and the local fraternal order of police, all wanting my money. Which is why I hadn't bothered to pick up voice mail messages since, oh, last July. I didn't even know what the number to call to get them was, anymore. I'd used my fax machine about three times in nineteen months---two of them in the first summer we lived here, to finalize the sale of our old house. I don't even need phone service for Internet, as our particular service is no-phone-line DSL.
I guess it took way too long to realize that there was no longer any reason to write a $62.47 check to Verizon every month.
I expected the phone company to flail and thrash about a bit when I called to break the news, and was not disappointed. Got the hard sell about how Verizon would be the only ones who could save my life if I needed to dial 911 really fast on a bad sunspots day, or something. I stood firm, if not a bit bitchy. Where was all this concern about my needs the last time I emailed their fraud department?
It doesn't matter. It's over. Our house is still wired, but we're once again off the grid. Someday it will seem adorably quaint that I thought we needed to be on it.
Update on March 7: Today's mail brought a refund check from Verizon of the credit on our account. The total? Eighty-one cents.