The Return

It wasn't widely commented on, but I've been mostly offline for the past eighteen hours. Surprisingly, the Internet still exists, and this bodes well for those of you who will survive my eventual death.

Yes, I had concerns.

We had some rain, elsewhere referred to as a storm, a rainstorm, or even the grating rain event, and in the midst of the lightning, thunder, and falling water I lost my Internet connection. These things happen, so I wasn't all that surprised. Annoyed, yes; isolated, certainly; apalled, nope.

!@(badlights.jpg:L120 popimg: "No Good")

The longer the outage extended, the more frustrated I was. I use DSL to connect, and coming from the "wall" is a typical RJ11 jack into which I plug the Pacbell-supplied "octopus." It makes the one jack two, one for the modem and another, with a filter, for the telephone line. Since the phone wasn't working, either, I figured it wasn't the modem and expected SBC to soon correct the problem. These things happen when it rains after a period of no rain, and even during periods solar activity.

My patience, however, has its limits, and when I wasn't able to get online this morning my brow furrowed (not by itself. I helped). After a bit, the modem returned to life, but it had been momentarily functional all along. Never longer than two or three minutes, but it did work occasionally. Better, the telephone gave me a dial tone, which I used to call SBC.

I spoke to some woman with a delightful accent who was no help at all. Okay, I lied to her about the number and flavor of my computers (it never helps to mention Linux), but followed her instructions. She couldn't find anything wrong, but put in a trouble ticket and dispatched someone. She couldn't see a problem, but suggested that the problem may be with "inside wiring."

I gulped, only, not really.

The one thing I know about interior wiring is that it's the customer's (read: my) responsibility. The phone co will charge, and charge exhorbitantly, to fix that kind of thing. Unknown to them, however, is that I did all the interior wiring myself (well, it was a part of my job for years). They may expect a nicely mounted wall jack, like everyone else has, and may shake their heads at the naked wire coming through a hole in the floor. I would be, too, only I drilled the hole sometime in the late sixties when my water bed broke and have found it to be a much handier place to run the wire than up the wall.

Later today, in recounting this story and my decision not to rewire the house today, I got a snide, uncharitable comment about preventive maintenance which I choose to ignore. I may have already run multiple lines under the house and, if not, it won't be a big deal. Ideally I'd like to install conduit down there and run the cable through that, but in the meantime I can just pull the existing line out with a new one attached and, voila!, re-terminate both ends. Now that I'm reasonably certain the problem lays between the telco demark and my computer, I know what to do.

When I said it was the rain I may have been optimistic. I mentioned that to the telco, too, but failed to say anything about the mice I saw saving themselves from our meager deluge. They're the ones I think did it.