I can add a new skill to my resume: wiring telephone jacks.
There’s a long story behind this…
…many years ago, I almost signed on with one of those 900-line psychic lines to earn some extra money. I went so far as to have a separate phone line installed, as the service required you to have a dedicated line (and with no long-distance or options of any kind, it wasn’t that expensive). I never followed up with the psychic hotline job (you should have seen the application package, it was enormous), but I kept the second phone line because I thought it might come in handy. I no longer recall how that line was installed, but I think the phone company did it. In any event, I had two phone jacks in the house, one in the living room and one in the back bedroom, and the bedroom jack became the second line.
Fast forward to about a year and a half ago, when I decided to get rid of my cable TV and upgrade my Internet service to broadband DSL (thereby saving about $30 a month). I had the DSL put onto the second phone line, which I could now consider a dedicated modem line.
However, at intervals, I would have trouble with my DSL connection. From time to time, there would be periods when I’d keep losing the connection over and over and over, making it impossible to work online. This seemed especially common in wet weather, or humid weather when the temperature dropped, so I thought moisture or condensation might be involved. That didn’t explain why it seemed to happen more on weekends, or at night. But it was very frustrating.
A few months ago, after talking to my ISP [again] about this, I did some elementary diagnostics. I changed extension cords around and took a phone out to the junction box and plugged it into the street line, and so on. The problem evidently was a lot of static and “noise” in the line. But it wasn’t clear where this was coming from. The line in from the street seemed clear, and the telephone cords in the house didn’t seem to be the problem. I went down to the crawl space to check the wiring between the junction box and the jacks. My house has a dirt-floor crawl space with about 40 inches of clearance, full of cobwebs and spiders and old boards and…well, some other time I’ll get into what else I’ve found down there.
It was at this time that I found, or at least really noticed and examined, that the phone line to the bedroom jack was entirely unanchored, and was draped and looped loosely around the joists and old boards and odd nails until it got to the point where it went up through the floor into the house. It was thickly covered with cobwebs and certainly didn’t look professional, safe, or secure. I cleaned it off and tried to tighten it up more firmly against the joists. But the DSL problems continued, and I knew that I should cut the line and install a new jack. I was just nervous about doing it. If I messed up, I’d lose my broadband connection until I could get it fixed.
But now that I’m self-employed, I have a lot more time to get a myriad of little problems and issues that I’ve wanted to get done for ages. Besides, a reliable Internet connection is now imperative. I’m buying new computer equipment and upgrading equipment and getting ready to set up a wireless network. After I kept losing my connection in the middle of attempting to put through a payment on an online transaction, I decided now was the time to get that phone line fixed. What I wanted to do was bring the line up through the floor in the front room, as close to the telephone junction box outside as possible, and install a new phone jack. I hoped that with the line as short as possible, and with as little of it in the crawl space as possible, and a new, tightly wired jack, the noise/static problem would be solved.
I looked up in WikiHow how to wire a phone jack–and I owe that writer for an important tip! I went down to the hardware store and bought a jack, for $3.98 including tax. I went down to the crawl space and swept the spiders out of the space where the wires came through the exterior wall, and measured the distance from the corner to the junction box. Then I went back to the front room, measured from the corner, estimated how thick the exterior wall was, and drilled a hole through the floor. When I went downstairs to see where the hole was, I was only about an inch and half from exactly where the wires came in. The only scary part was taking the wire cutter and cutting the line. Then I pushed it up into the hole, went back upstairs, and connected the wires to the jack. The hardest part was fastening the jack to the wainscoting board, after connecting the wires (but connecting the wires would have been a pain to do after the jack base was screwed onto the wall, so…). I tested the jack before and after I did that and the dial tone was loud and clear.
All through this process I had plenty of “help” from Cerridwen, who thought all this business with strange noises in the crawl space and wires coming up out of holes in the floor required her intense supervision. I kept having to pick her up and move her to do things, like, operate the power drill. After I checked the DSL connection on my computer, I went back into the front room and found Cerridwen keeping a close eye on the new jack. Clearly, she was convinced that just because it had stopped moving by itself, it wasn’t to be trusted.
It’s only been one day, but so far the DSL connection hasn’t blinked even once.