Copper Wire

We've been waiting a week for the Verizon telephone repairman to arrive and fix our standard copper wire landline phone. When I grew up, this was the only kind of telephone that existed. In those days the phone company took pride in its performance as a public utility, and in return it enjoyed a monopoly. But things have changed a lot since deregulation and the proliferation of cell phones, which we also use extensively.

We've actually been waiting over two weeks for relief from the scratchy loud static that emanates from our landline phone every time it rains. Eventually the rain dries up and normal service resumes. In our
ignorance we thought it might be caused by flooding. I promptly made an appointment with the Verizon telephone robot, which spoke to me in a friendly, relaxed manner, analyzing my problem in a chatty question-and-answer style. At the end of our conversation, I was invited to say goodbye or just hang up. Considering that I was conversing with a robot, it is a credit to their engineers that I was momentarily undecided whether it would be impolite to just hang up.

The bad news about our first appointment is that static-free service eventually resumed after the sun dried the wires, so I cancelled the appointment. Several days later, contrary to Accu-Weather on TV, heavy rain returned and I had to start all over again at the end of the queue. This time I called a human at the company to object to beginning again, but my complaints were summarily dismissed and there was no effective appeal. I was also cautioned that if the repairman determined (using expertise available only to him) that the trouble emanated from inside my house instead of an outside line, a charge starting at close to $100 an hour would be imposed. I was also told that my "appointment" would be all day, anytime from 8am until 7pm, a kind of house arrest.

This morning around 9am, a Verizon repairman arrived to diagnose and fix our problem. He quickly determined that the problem was actually caused by the same backyard squirrels who destroyed my wife's tomato plants last year. It seems that squirrels commonly use copper telephone wires and its insulation to keep their teeth ground down. He showed me the areas, which was most of the wire across our backyard, which had been chewed to pieces. Every time it rained, the water on the wires caused constant static until the wires dried up. He reported that the squirrels were brazenly standing by and watching him as he worked, impatiently waiting to get back to their highway in the sky as soon as he left.

Our repairman was a long-time employee of the company, enjoying unlimited medical benefits and good pay thanks to his still strong union. He was a living symbol to me of the way things used to be, when telephone repairmen were dispatched quickly, always competent, and took pride in their work. He confided that the repairmen sent to our home on previous occasions to fix this problem saw the same thing he did but did not spend the necessary time to replace the entire wire running across our backyard due to a combination of daily quota requirements and laziness, relying instead on temporary but ineffective fixes which he briefly discussed.

In this case the good old days, at least as far as copper wire landline phones are concerned, were definitely better.