I’m glad no one was home when the lighting struck. Who knows how many places in that house were zapped with electrons (see previous post).
Since then, the phones have not worked, yet emergency services kept responding to phantom 9-1-1 calls. Phantom 4-1-1 calls have also been made based on the phone bill! The police threatened (as heard through the neighbor who actually talked to them) to call the phone company and have the service turned off if any more calls were made.
So the phone company finally made it out for repairs. (OK, they were never actually called for repairs until recently, but c’mon!) They were supposed to arrive between 8:00 am and 1:00 pm; they drove up around 5:30 pm.
I’m not certain, but I think every dwelling has both a box buried in the lawn near the street and a Network Interface box on the outside of the house. The line from the buried box to the house was dead.
After leaving several large holes in the lawn, they determined that a new line would have to be run from the box in front of the neighbors house, to the in-laws buried box, then all the way to the side of the house.
I asked them to check the inside lines as well. After fiddling with the box outside the house, he asked me to go in and plug in a phone. (I guess this would close the circuit and allow him to test; there is no dial tone with the buried line being out.) I couldn’t do that as the phones inside were fried by those surging electrons, so he gave me a little device to plug in. One of his little devices told him “11 feet”, so we trooped into the garage where he started jacking with the outlet there. When he attached clips to the lines, a strange warbling electronic sound was heard; from this he deduced the alarm system was the culprit. This was odd, as there is no active alarm system in the house. Nevertheless, the defunct system was shorted and causing problems. When I informed the tech there was no alarm system, he promptly bypassed those wires.
To make a short story long, phone service should be restored by the time I get home. The lines are supposed to be buried this morning and if the inside lines are fine as stated, it should be good to go.
