Don't call us ... we'll call you ...

And the saga continues! On May 18 I finally sprung for a new cordless phone (you don't wanna know how much I paid for it) and brought it home, all excited to finally have a landline after all this time. I read the phone's directions carefully, plugged that baby in, and threatened my family with something horrible if they picked up the receiver before 16 hours had passed. (Sixteen hours being the recommended time the phone needed to fully charge and work properly.)

The following morning I grabbed my cell phone and called our landline number, eagerly awaiting the ring. Which never came. And at this point, I just knew the idea of merely plugging in a new phone was too good to be true, and something had to go wrong with this venture. Sure enough, I picked up my brand-spankin'-new phone and found no dial tone. Zip, zilch, nada!

In sheer frustration I yanked out Dan's work phone (it took a lot of patience and effort just to untangle the cords behind the desk to figure out which phone I needed here) and plugged that in. As I suspected ... still nothing. The problem wasn't my new phone, it was something else altogether. And I steeled myself against the knowledge that this was going to require numerous phone calls and emails—in Spanish, of course, just to make it extra fun—to get the situation fixed.

I emailed my friend Eric, kind of a pseudo-landlord (since the real one is out of the country), and he called the phone company (ICE) and reported the problem. He then told me that ICE would be out to the house within a few days to check the line. I hardly thought this would happen, and here I am a week later and they never did show. Surprise!

Yesterday I called ICE and reported the problem again. They told me the issue is not with their installation, but rather a problem within the house: meaning, they couldn't help me. (The funny thing is, this morning my pseudo-landlord/friend called ICE again and they said they would look into it and send someone out. Good grief!)

Moving on ... I contacted the administrator for our housing area and she said I needed to have the construction guys come out and establish a connection between the phone line and the house for our landline to function. I had hoped she would get in touch with these guys, but instead she passed along an email address for me to use.

So yesterday I emailed the construction company, but I haven't heard back. So I just emailed them again and copied the administrator on this one. I will not be even remotely surprised if I have to continue bugging them for days to come, but if I keep cc'ing the administrator, maybe she'll get fed up and make a call, too.

Sooooooo ... two years from the initial request for a landline and here I sit, still using the 'ol cell phone for my national calls. Anyone want to place bets on whether I have a functioning line before I leave for Wisconsin in four weeks? I'll keep you posted!