It was too good to last

[mbarrick]

For the first time ages we went a whole week without any "we'll be entering your apartment to tear something apart" notices. Last night a little note was slipped under the door saying that someone will be in tomorrow or Wednesday to install a new phone line. I'm dreading this. The original wiring up to the demarkation point, from the look of the hardware, was installed sometime before WWII. Beyond the demarkation point, in those decades before cordless phones, the line was (badly) extended and split to install jacks in both bedrooms, the kitchen and the living room. Since we've been there I've split it again and run a wire through the wall with the pocket doors to a new jack in the room we are using for a den (the only extension of the lot, by the way, that runs hidden inside a wall instead of on the surface). I spent hours digging a trough in the plaster of one wall to conceal the particularly bad job done with the extension to the kitchen followed by the carefully filling the trough and matching the paint. I fear wires being ripped out, new gaping holes in walls that have just been fixed, and my Internet connection being fucked up for a month because of someone connecting the wires to the wrong leads or somehow botching up in some way that I can't even imagine at this point.

Telephones are century-old technology. I built one from *scratch* for fun when I was 11. Right now I'm in the middle of coordinating the interoperation of roughly 500 telephones in nine locations in five cities. Despite this I am pretty much resigned at this point in losing control of the telephone in my own home and having it botched-up for the next four to fourteen weeks.