14 September 1999
So after calling the electrician three times, the secretary finally told him she was sick of fending me off and to just talk to me, for godsake. He was surprisingly cordial, and was happy to agree to pick up our housekey from the model house (we'd left a copy for the realtor to put in our file for just this purpose) and said he'd come by the house during the day to fix our nonworking outlets and phone jacks. He asked if I wanted a dual-line plate installed on the office jack - that is, one jack for line one, and one for line two. Well, we'd had to separate plates put in, but I thought What the heck? and told him to go ahead and do it.

When I got home yesterday evening I wasn't feeling very happy - the podiatrist's nurse had taped my foot just a hair wrong, and I was forming a blister; and in an attempt to walk as little as possible I'd been juggling too many things on the trip from the car to the house. But I dumped my stuff by the door and limped up the stairs to see if our phone had actually been fixed.

Sure enough, there was a two-jack plate installed, and a phone was plugged into the lower jack. I picked it up. Dial tone! Hurrah! I plugged the phone into the top jack and picked up the handset. Silence. Not so hurrah.

I was a bit tired, so I made a leap of intuition: Since it was the second phone line that didn't work previously, I assumed that the line on which I got a dial tone was the main line, and the line on which I got nothing was the second line.

Well, dammit.

Forget the electrician. It costs, but I figured I'd call Bell Atlantic and get them to send out a technician who would actually test all the lines before he left the house. Matt came home while I was navigating the endless sea of automated menu systems that is the Bell Atlantic Customer Service network, and after I'd finally talked to someone and asked them to come Friday, I explained to Matt what was going on. He was as annoyed as I was. I told him that I'd been too irritable to reconnect the modem and such, and he decided to go do that - at least he could check his e-mail on the main line.

I folded myself up on the couch with a book. As Matt will tell you, when I'm reading, I notice nothing around me. Two chapters into the book, I vaguely registered him coming down and picking something up off the coffee table, but didn't pay much attention. A few minutes later, he came back downstairs and patiently collected my attention.

"How much do you love me?"

This is a frequent precursor to a gift or surprise of some sort. "A lot!"

He handed me the cordless phone. "The computer is dialed in, and I'm getting a dial tone on the main line."

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. If the computer is connected, then it's using a phone line. If you get a dial tone on the main line instead of modem squeal...

We have our second phone line! Hurray!

One slow, agonizing step at a time, we're getting the house we paid for.