Woody Cavenaugh

I have often said that the place I live is so remote that I barely have phone service. In this vein, we spend way too much time reporting phone problems. Only one of our problems has been a dead line. All of the other problems are other people on our line. We pick up the phone and someone somewhere is already using it. This probably sounds innocent to you. It might even be except for the fact that the nearest phone junction box always looks like it has been opened...with explosives.

Our phone goes wonkey, we call the phone company, they fix it, talk to you again in a couple of weeks. The weirdest is when we make a call and two phones ring, our parties, and some random person.

Two nights ago our phone rings at 2:30 in the morning. If our phone rings at 2:30 in the morning, the person on the other end of the phone had better have some really bad news. Death is the only excuse for calls at that hour. So Sara picks up the phone expecting the worst. Instead she gets what sounds like a guy at a party at 2:30 in the morning on a Wednesday night say, "Someone from this number just called, I am returning the call." Sara was polite and told him that no one called from this number as everyone here was asleep. About fifteen minutes later the phone rings again and I awake from a deep sleep to answer, I don't know exactly what I said and I don't think he knew either, but I am pretty sure we both realized that I was trying to be polite.

We get home yesterday and notice that someone is using our phone, although Sara and I each held one of the only two phones we had. I picked up. I hear a woman's voice say, "I gotta go bye" and hang up. A few minutes later, Sara noticed that our phone was being used again and she picked up. Again a woman's voice, "I gotta go bye", and darned if she didn't hang up again. Until bed time this became a game to us, we would notice that someone was on the phone, we would pick up and now say anything. The woman would always say, "I gotta go bye" and hang up. We also noticed that through the day we had received several phone calls from folks we did not know and even had a couple of "returning your call" messages on our machine.

Sara called the phone company to report the problem. It turns out that you can only have problems with your phone between 8am and 5pm, otherwise no one was going to help you.

Last night we were introduced to a new type of hell. The hell of the one ring every fiften minutes the entire night. At about 4am Sara who had enough as she doesn't fall to sleep nearly as easily as me picked up the phone and in a clear awake and deadly voice said, "I do not appreciate you using my phone line". I can only imagine it sounded to the other party like the voice of a very angry god. It sent a shiver down my back that is for sure.

At any rate, I can only guess that whoever is horking our phone line, they are nocturnal. So payback is a bitch. I'll be calling my house every hour on the hour until I get home tonight. Its either that or have a psychotic episode at 3 in the morning. Only I will say into the phoneline, "Stay right where you are. I'm comming over to burn your house down."