Lift Up Your Hearts!

I wrote earlier about our failing telephone system.  We limped along for a week with all calls forwarded to one or the other of our cell phones.  Actually, it wasn't much of a limp.  It was slightly annoying not to be able to have more than one person on this end of a call, and since my cell phone has no "free" minutes (it's a prepaid plan), I was conscious of the cost of every call.  But it wasn't that much, really.  A definite plus was that the forwarding message, "please wait while we try to contact your party" effectively foiled all those robotic telemarketers!

Still, now that it's fixed (details follow), I'm glad not to be so tied to my cell phone.  I said to Heather, "I feel like a teenager, carrying my cell phone in my pocket all the time," to which she replied, "You're not a teenager, Mom.  You still jump every time it rings."

To answer that question, I have to explain how the situation deteriorated further.  I woke up one morning to no Internet connection.  This was a little more serious than the phone problem.  After trying a few of the usual fixes, I called our local cable provider to determine whether or not there was a general outage.  That should have been a simple question, but apparently it wasn't in the script, and I had to wait through a lot of help I hadn't asked for.  You know the kind—reminiscent of bad Sunday School classes—where they tell you in painstaking detail what you already know, and when you finally get to the questions you can't answer, they drop the subject.  Still, I did finally learn that there was no general outage, and I'd need to do more work on my end.

No success—and frankly, with two very active grandchildren visiting, I had little time and less incentive to worry about it.  But Porter came home last night and we tackled the problem first thing this morning.  I won't burden you with the details of everything we did—anyone who finds this entry and has a simlar problem is welcome to ask for more information in a comment—but when we switched back to the other router, it didn't work at all anymore, either!  That was just too much coincidence.  Bottom line is that the power supply was bad.  Not totally bad, and not in a way that was detectable to any of the techs who were poking around remotely.  But when we switched power supplies, suddenly the router started acting more normally...and we had Internet access again...and lo and behold, even the phone worked!