dormouse1953

So what do you do when you look at your phone and see a missed call? It's an undisclosed number, but they did leave a voicemail. Only problem is the person has a thick accent and has mumbled a long message into the phone of which you can't understand a single word.

When I got back from holiday nearly two weeks ago, I was slightly surprised that there was no flashing light on my phone answering machine.  Usually there are a number of blank messages from cold callers not wishing to leave a message.

It's an indication of how little I use my phone that I didn't get round to thinking about this until two days ago.  In that time, I had not needed to make a phone call and no-one had told me they'd tried to phone but couldn't get through.  And I hadn't had any cold callers.  And it's not like I've been relying on my mobile.  I tend to switch that on only if I'm going out. 

It was because of my mobile that I discovered the phone wasn't working.  I'd noticed a while back that voicemail on the mobile had got switched off and it was only last week that I worked out how to switch it back on again.  And it wasn't until Tuesday that I though I ought to test that it was indeed working.  But, remembering at this point that the landline had been suspiciously quite over the last couple of weeks, the first thing I tried was phoning the landline from the mobile.  Line busy.

So I went to the phone and picked up the handset.  No dial tone.

The phone is a combined cordless phone and answer machine so I wondered if that was faulty.  There is another extension in my bedroom, but I know there is a fault with that: the bell doesn't sound for an incoming call.  As the phone is right next to my head when I'm in bed, I consider that a feature not a bug.  But there was no dial tone on that, either.

I did find an old handset that I brought from my old place in London when I moved over twenty years ago.  I hadn't plugged it in for at least ten years, so I was not sure if that was working.  But I didn't get a dial tone on that, either.

I phoned BT and they tested the line.  They couldn't detect a fault.  They got me to disassemble the socket to reveal a test socket and to plug the hand set directly into that.  Still no dial tone.  They wanted me to find another handset that was known to be working.  I didn't want to ask my neighbours if they had one I could borrow; that sounded a bit weird.  The alternative was to get an engineer to visit, and if it turned out that it was my handset that was faulty, I would get charged £129.  I reckoned that all three handsets couldn't be faulty in the same way and gambled on the odds that it was the line.

As it happened, after that call I remembered that my Sky satellite box has a phone connection - you use it if you want to order a film from their Box Office service.  The status screen for the box showed the phone line unconnected, which seemed like more evidence in my favour.

The engineer came out this afternoon and the first thing he did was to dismantle the socket again and plug a test phone in.

"Dead as a door-nail," he said.  I was right.

So he traced the phone line back to a box on the wall between my house and next door.  After a few minutes he came back in to say the fault was further down the line and he had to work out where.  He drove off, saying he'd be back.

I did notice whilst he was away that my broadband connection went down.  After a few minutes it came back again and so did the engineer.  And the phone was now working.  Apparently, someone had done a bodge job of connecting the line somewhere and it had eventually failed.

When he'd gone I tested the other two handsets.  They were both still working.  And Sky was reporting the phone line connected.

I haven't had any cold callers, yet.

Just got back from a shopping trip and the light was flashing on my answerphone.  Not unusual, it's usually a cold caller.  But when I looked at the caller-ID display the number looked familiar.  Then I realised it was my number.

Well, when I played back the message, it was blank, so I guess it probably was a cold caller.  I know caller-ID can be spoofed so I wonder if this is a new ploy by cold callers to get round those devices that block specified numbers.  Nobody  would think to block their own number.

Or maybe I was calling from an alternate universe but something prevented me from leaving a message.