Oh, So That's How It REALLY Works

On Friday afternoon, at around 1PM, Mami is frantically knocking on my office door.

Apparently I hadn't heard Papi yelling for me (I still don't know how I could have missed that, he's pretty loud). The phone company had called him (don't know why him and not Carlos) and said that they were at the apartment to install the line. We had a suspicion that something was up when that morning Carlos was complaining that he couldn't get service on our landline. But, I had no time to argue about the fact that they said they would only be there Monday, there was just enough time to grab the phone from the office and rush to the apartment with Mami (Carlos was at work).

We arrived at the apartment and one guy needed to do an inspection. That was quite easy because there had never been any phone service there. We walked through all the rooms and there were no phone jacks. None. I don't know why I didn't notice that last week when I checked all the outlets (the only one that didn't function was the one in the bathroom). Around this time Carlos arrived.

So, no phone jacks = no phone line.

One of the workers then crossed the street with a length of phone cable, climbed a pole, and basically attached the wire to the pole. Simple as that. He ran it to a smaller pole just outside our house and tacked it to there as well. In the corner of our office window, he chiseled a hole through the wall with a hammer and screwdriver, then threaded the other end of the wire through. We then went inside and asked if we have a phone jack. What? Um, no. I had no idea that we had to buy our own.

Carlos ran to a hardware store to buy one. Well, he went to about two or three that were closed, since it was lunch time, before finding one that is open. It cost 25 cents. By the time he came back the phone line has been checked and is proven to be working, so all the workers had to do was put the phone line in at one end and the cable in the other and we had a working phone.

The whole process took less than an hour. It probably would have been less if we had known that they were coming and that we needed to buy our own phone jack. But within 24 hours of our request we had a working phone.

I hope that getting internet will be as easy.