This afternoon, we got a flurry of calls of dead phone lines at one of our other campuses. More than a dozen were called in. So they asked me to go out and check them out, thinking that it might be our digital PBX, which usually doesn't have a lot noisy or bad lines, the old timer usually just fails completely. :o( So I had to drop everything and go out there. This alone was enough excitement for the day.
So I get out there and go into the closet, and I about stepped in a big sticky trap with not a rat, but a little field mouse in it. Next to that was a big rat trap, the kind that can take a finger off. Well, it also had a field mouse in it. I dunno how he managed to trip the plastic paddle, which was bigger than he was. Both were pretty dried out, been dead quite a while. So I took them out into the room, and immediately a half dozen ladies were grossed out by the sight of the critters, "EWW! Get them out of here!" was the general response along with hands over their eyes.
I checked the lines with my buttset and found a couple okay but 8 had no dialtone, some were really hissy and noisy. I called the help desk and said that they were going to need to get a SBC tech out there. She said that there were a couple more that were just called in as dead - oh well. I got ready to leave, and luckily here comes the SBC tech walking in the door. I said, good luck! There are 8 lines dead. He said he had a trouble ticket for only two. I figured that the problem was probably caused by last night's rain, and water getting into the cable. So I figured that if he found the problem with one, he would probably find and fix the problem for all of them. But he said that if he had a major problem he would't do it and he'd have to call cable repair. That usually means another couple day's down time. :-(
Well, I left soon after, because the problems were all out there in the street somewhere. I had had enough excitement for the day. The ladies gave me a very dirty look as I left, as if I still had the rat traps in my hand. But that's alright, I only go out to this campus maybe once a month, and by the time I'm out there again, they will have forgotten about the critters in the traps. I hope...
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