Technological genius

This whole week there wasn't a dial tone on any of the phones in the house. I finally called the cable company on my cell yesterday to find out what the problem was with the digital phone line. After getting through the voice recognition answering system and not one but two customer service representatives, we finally got to the bottom of the problem: the line was plugged into the wrong phone jack on the back of the modem. Nothing mechanically wrong with the line, it was merely plugged into Line 2 instead of Line 1, which I inadvertently switched when I unplugged the modem and then plugged everything back in. If I had thought about the problem for more than a minute I probably could have figured out the answer. D'oh.

I bet it gets pretty annoying to answer dumb calls like that all day. But in fairness, I think it's an easy mistake to make based on the design of the modem. The Line 1 jack is actually below the Line 2 jack. This problem is probably right there on their FAQs list.

I just hope there weren't any important calls I missed during the week. Fortunately, the "land line" isn't the number I typically give out for important stuff.