Jul 06 2006
Extension is use (or cell phones at the ready)
Two nights ago a heavy downpour moved through Lexington and I was afraid that our broken gutter would finally fall off the house. Well that didn’t happen, but something else did.
If one were to call our house, one would not reach us. You wouldn’t even get our answering machine because of a short in a telephone wire somewhere in our house. Our cordless phone reads “Extension is Use” which usually means if the answering machine is on or if someone is on the line upstairs.
I unplugged the answering machine-”Extension in Use”
I unplugged the upstairs phone-”Extension in Use”
This happened once before and we made a service call to Alltel to fix the problem. They fixed the problem and said that it may have been caused by metal staples holding one telephone cord to the baseboards. But this is the second time this has happened -both after heavy rain storms.
I took a look at our upstairs telephone line, traced it to the wall, then into the other room and finally to it’s endpoint in the interior of the house. The telephone line ends at a window where the previous owners drilled a hole through the window frame, then ran the rest of the line along the roof then down the side to the telephone box on the first floor.
It’s only a guess, but I’m thinking that problem is somewhere on the exterior of the house. Something like a squirrel or a racoon probably chewed or scratched the line and now it shorts whenever it rains.
But that’s only a guess and we’ll hopefully have the Alltel experts come out and take a look at the problem for us, again.
Update: Our home phone works again. Carter was right, though it seems it was the previous owners’ funny wiring more likely than a squirrel. The Alltel repair guy disconnected one of the outside lines and now everything works.
Or, the call is coming from INSIDE YOUR HOUSE!!!