The AT&T technician is here. He called me bright and early (8:03 AM) to let me know he would be here within half an hour and was here at 8:15. It’s 8:40 now and he’s still here, trying to determine the source of the problem.

Apparently there’s no issue with the signal from the pole to the apartment building. We got the manager to let him into the locked room in the basement and he said the signal down there that’s being sent up to our apartment building is fine…

It’s now 9:30. Had to take a break to help the guy, who left around 9:00 AM. So he came up here, tested our jacks with his testing device thingy and received no signal. I could tell he was mentally scratching his head. There was a good signal coming into the box downstairs, but it wasn’t coming up to our apartment. He left the device on the jack to send some sort of signal back downstairs and went back into the basement to see if it worked that way. He came back up and said it didn’t. Then he opened up the jack to see if there was any problem inside the jack. There was none. He went back downstairs and decided to try one more thing. He said our building was using a multi-line cable, something older buildings don’t use, and that as a last-ditch resort he switched to a secondary set of lines in our cable. He came up and opened up the jack again, removed the old lines, and connected the news lines. And then… success! Dial tone. He did it with the jack in the other room.

So according to him, and he says he doesn’t know how, the lines went bad and we had a defective cable. Of course, what this means is that it’s on our end, not AT&T’s, so I got another $55 charge. Joy.

I do appreciate him taking the time to troubleshoot. I guess it had been an intermittent problem. Ever have a pair of headphones that only sound right if you hold the cable a certain way? I guess the previous two guys missed the root cause, but guy #1 didn’t bill me, guy #2 did, and now guy #3 did. Though this latest guy really put in the work to troubleshoot, try a few different things, and actually fix the problem. He didn’t have to fix it. His job is just to determine if it’s AT&T’s wiring or our inside wiring. Once he determined it wasn’t AT&T, he could have just left and charged me $55 for coming to that conclusion. But he fixed the problem and didn’t charge any extra for it.

Now I’m wondering if my apartment building has to pay for this. It’s inside wiring of my apartment buidling, something that was installed and should be maintained by the building. They wouldn’t rent out a new apartment to a tenant with a dead phone jack. I need to look more into this, but I’m either going to invoice our managerial company or deduct $110 from my next rent check.

Right now, I’m tired and hungry. And guess what, my dresser is now being delivered on Tuesday!!! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. I took today off work specifically to wait for the damn thing. Thankfully, it looks like Tim will be off on Tuesday so he can take care of it. Now that the phone technician has come and went and my delivery has been rescheduled, I’m debating going into work. But it’s Friday, and such a nice day, and I don’t know… blah.

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