May 6, 2009

• The Things I Do for My Art

  All right… I confess, I did it, really, so I can start getting paid for practicing one of my arts.  Doug and I needed to install a new dedicated phone line so I can go to work at a psychic hotline network.  Ill health and physical handicaps made me stop my summer rounds of fairs and festivals years ago, and KaiOaty doesn’t generate much work, and a lot of that is pro bono.s  In the current economic climate, Greyfox can use some help supporting the family, and in hard time there’s always demand for the services of psychics.

  The local phone co-op has two levels of service.  Members can either pay them an extra $40.00 a month for the co-op to assume responsibility for the wiring inside the building as well as all the transmission lines outside, or we can be responsible for everything on our side of the junction box on a little pole beside the house.  Ever since I have had phone service in this valley, about a quarter century, I’ve done the inside work myself.

  It may come as no surprise to those who know me that we did our wiring job on the cheap.  The bountiful dumpsters at Felony Flats have been generous in many ways, including telephone lines.  The cable that supplied the power and signal to the original phone in here had an extra two unused elements in it that would carry signal and power for the new line.  All we needed to do, I thought, was to open up the little box on the baseboard and wire into it a cable with a connector on the other end that can plug into the base unit of my new cordless headset phone when it gets here.

  I did that:  found a 25 foot phone line that had been damaged near its middle, cut it in two, and wired one bare end into the box.  To get to the box, we had needed to move a lamp, a clock radio, box of tissues, a couple of dozen books, two bedside tables, and twenty pounds or so of assorted rocks and crystals plus ten or a dozen candles and candle holders.  The box where the phone line enters the house is in the corner at the head of my bed.

  I assumed a position lying across the bed with my torso hanging off into a little hole about a foot and a half wide and two and a half feet long.  Moving a bookshelf would have given us a longer space and moving the bed would have made it wider, but either of those things would have required massive furniture moving, because things are jammed together pretty tightly in our main room here.  It was easier this way, take my word for it.

  My first failure was in finding a way to remove the cover from the little box.  I’m used to an old style with a screw in the center.  This one had no visible fasteners, and I hesitated to force it.  Doug, who was standing by as ground support to fetch and carry, watched my butt and listened to my mutterings a while, then offered to see if he could figure it out.  We exchanged places, and he didn’t hesitate to pop the cover off the box.  Then he let me get back down there to deal with the wiring.

  We both thought it would be wise for him to watch and learn, so he contorted himself in and around the bookcase to watch.  I don’t think he learned much.  I stripped insulation from wire ends, twisted things together, taped it all up, put the cover back on the box, and confidently crab-walked back out of the hole to test the new line with our old phone… nothing.

  We discussed it, Doug examined wires and terminals, and we talked some more, discussing various possibilities involving wires of red, green, black and yellow.  Finally, I cut a terminal from one end of a new phone cord that had only two elements, one black, and one the copper color of bare wire.  It took me a while to realize that the “bare” wire was encased in transparent insulation, but even then my new wiring job conveyed no signal.

  Finally, having run out of ideas and indoor options, I went out to the box on the pole to see if, perhaps, the man from the co-op had left something switched off or unplugged.  The sun was going down and mosquitoes were swarming.  Everything looked fine, except for the loose ends of the black and yellow wires protruding into the box from the end of the cable from which the green and red wires were attached to terminals in the box.  OF COURSE!

  The woman in the office who took my order had said service would be delivered to the box.  The man who turned on the new line at the stanchion across the road and tested it at the box had said service was working, at the box.  I had been thinking that their part was outside and my part was inside.  That left the part between the box and the wall, which, contractually, is my part.  I’d not been thinking right.

  First, Doug brushed mosquitoes away from my face while I stood substantially blinded by the setting sun so I could fumble around right-handedly trying to fit wire between little copper washers.  Then he offered to take over, and I swatted skeeters while he stood with his back to the sun and left-handedly finished the job.

  Back inside, with a bit more stripping and twisting and taping of wires, I finally backed out of the hole behind the bed and tested the new line.  It worked.  Doug must have seen something pass across my face, because he asked me, “What?”

  I replied that for an instant I had almost felt triumphant for having gotten the job done, but then the reality of the number and magnitude of my mistakes caught up with me.  He nodded, grimaced, pumped his fists in the air and said, “D-minus! YES!!”

  Now, when the phone gets here, I can get to work.  Meanwhile, my hands are so fumble-fingered from the residual fatigue that I’m spending more than the usual amount of time correcting typos, and my shoulders and upper arms are burning.  I slept fitfully last night, as usual when I’m fatigued.  The more I need sleep, the harder it is to get more than an hour or so at a time.  Enough whining!  I did it, made a passing grade — it’s done.
  

  • 7:54 pm
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