At about one o’clock this morning, the doorbell rang. I’m not completely I heard it, but I definitely heard our dog barking from downstairs shortly after the fact. I peeked out the window, which thankfully I don’t have to get out of bed in order to do, only to see what looked like a police car, parked in front of our driveway, in the pouring rain.
Turns out — and I learned this later, after the fact, from my father, who answered the door, and in more detail this evening — the police had received a 911 call from our home phone number. Which would be no mean feat, since, as usual, the phone line went out entirely when the rain started. We had nothing but a busy signal and static, and nobody here had called in an emergency. (The dog’s the only one who, in all likelihood, was even awake.)
I hope whoever did make that call, whose signals somehow got crossed with ours, got the help they needed. Or that it was nothing but crossed signals. Apparently, the 911 operator had been disconnected mid-call and tried to call the number back only to get a busy signal. So I can’t blame the cop for driving out here and waking us up.
Verizon, who’s in charge of maintaining the phone line, on the other hand…
It’s almost funny. The phone had also gone out earlier in yesterday, briefly, during an even lighter rainfall in the afternoon. And this, ironically, was just a few short minutes after two Verizon employees came to the door to follow up on the last time the phone went out. I swear, the techs I spoke to then seemed nice enough, but the only Verizon employees who actually seem to give a damn are in public relations. Need to put in a repair request? That could take weeks. Expect the repair tech to show up on time with maps of the area he’s actually in? That’s expecting too much. But oh man, post a couple of times on Twitter, and you’ll get responses there, over the phone to follow up, and, apparently, in person a week or two later.
Granted, the two who showed up yesterday really just wanted to up-sell us to FIOS, which my parents aren’t especially interested in — not least of all because they get their cable and Internet service elsewhere. The two Verizon reps wanted to tell me about the horror that is double-billing — getting (gasp!) services from two companies when you could be getting it from one — and remind me that Verizon owns all the land lines on Long Island. Which, I have to say, sounded vaguely ominous, almost threatening. Why tell me that, unless it’s to say, “Don’t go thinking you can get phone service from someone else too!” Honestly, I don’t even know if that’s true, and they quickly lost interest in me when it was clear I wasn’t the one making the financial decisions about any of these services.
Anyway, that was the very start of my Wednesday. The rest of it, after I managed to get back to sleep, then wake up and get to work, was pretty average. I spent a whole lot of it working on collating review responses. Which sounds about exciting as it is.