After more than a week of silence, my phone rang shortly before dinner. It was the AT&T technician, reporting that he'd switched my phone service to a different cable in order to bypass the short in the local loop.

I'd been stressed by the outage, which prevented me from placing and receiving calls at home. Since I don't have a cell phone, pager, or separate secondary/work/fax/modem line, this made me difficult to reach. Luckily my DSL kept operating despite the short. The nadir came today, when I was stuck for six hours waiting for the technician in case he needed access to my home. (No four-hour windows were available, and my housemate had to go to work.) As it turned out, the tech didn't need access, and staying home kept me from lots of tasks I needed to do: going to the bank, exercising, shopping for groceries, mailing letters, returning a library book, doing laundry, testing the irrigation system, and placing calls on the public phone.

Frankly, I'm frustrated. This is the third phone outage I've endured this year. The fix is trivial, and waiting around for a tech is a waste of time. Why couldn't AT&T have sent someone out on Tuesday morning?

Despite (or perhaps because of) my lack of service, I had a productive day today. After my housemate got home I was able to run some errands--largely just catching up. Yesterday we got back from a three-day vacation at the beach and found 89 new e-mails and various crises. Lots more catching up to do tomorrow, so I'd better call it a night and get to bed.