We have had a whole series of technical problems lately with our phone service.

It started with a lot of static on the line. Then a weird thing occurred over the weekend. A couple of technicians from where I work had called me on separate phones for help with a system problem. I started answering a question from one of them and then when I paused I was surprised to hear a different person on the line. Just as suddenly that person was gone and the first one was back, explaining that his line had gone dead and he had redialed. Then my boss jumped in wanting an update on the problem and I was playing roulette with three different callers. I couldn’t really be sure who I was talking to. It would have made a good Abbott and Costello comedy routine.

My wife checked with the phone service and found out we had had call waiting installed unbeknowst to us. We had never subscribed to call waiting but it turned out that the phone company had switched us on to it to compensate for a loss of some other obscure feature on our DSL service that was being discontinued. Since we both generally prefer to finish one call before starting another, we put in an order to have that turned off. Which they did but not before we had a couple other weird conversations like the first one.

Of course that is not how call waiting is supposed to work anyway. You are supposed to get a signal that you have another call and then be able to choose to accept it. It’s not supposed to just hang up the first caller and automatically accept the second. So we had a phone man out at the house to check that out. Finally he found a short in a line which apparently provided just enough line interrupt to seem like the signal to switch. Fixing this cleared up the static also.

After he had left we discovered that our second line now has no dial tone. So now we have another order in to get that fixed.