More fun than you can shake a baby at...

One of the perks of living where I do is that there is about ZERO coverage of any cell phone carrier. Actually, that's not true. It seems that you can have just enough coverage to leave about 4 seconds of information on a voicemail or perhaps tell the person on the other line that "I am hearing some static and I might drop the ca-."

In fact, if there was an emoticon map to demonstrate the coverage of the Denver area, it would show that I live in the center of a frowny face surrounded by miles and miles of happy faces. I LIVE IN A FROWNY FACE.

:(

I can't tell you how fantastic it's been to be worried about my dog, finally get enough of a signal to call the vet, eventually getting to talk to the vet only to hear those three tones that indicate that the call has been dropped. The dread of realizing that you've got to go through all of that again before the office closes in five minutes is awesome. It's thrilling to be sharing sweet words with a boyfriend only to realize that he's no longer at the other end of the line. And when you FINALLY get to call back, the mood has dissipated. Sex-ay.

So I finally decided to get a home line installed and after figuring out which bundle can save me the most money, I had a phone line! Well...really, I had a phone number and the date when everything was supposed to magically work.

Some women dream of their wedding day. But not me. Each night leading up to that date, I'd go to sleep envisioning actually being able to talk on the phone without screaming "can you hear me now?" and "is this better?" It seemed almost too good to be true. I even went to the store to pick out a brand new phone with the boyfriend.*

The day of, I figured I should probably figure out which jack to plug the phone into. Sure, my house was built in 1882, but I figured that the crackwhores had to call out for pizza from somewhere. I was positive that I had a multiple jacks.

So I checked the bedrooms. Nope, none there. Was there one in the living room? Nada. Surely the kitchen has one, right? No. Not so much. Turns out the only jack I had was in the dining room. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DINING ROOM WALL. Right. So my postage stamp of a place has a jack in the middle of the frickin' room - the only room that WOULDN'T make sense to put a jack anyway.

"It's okay," I thought. "I'll make do." But it turns out, I couldn't even do that.

I'm sure you'll be SHOCKED to hear that the day when it was supposed to be turned on? Yeah... it didn't work. Turns out that people who could die in a fire due to bad wiring aren't exactly concerned about being able to call out for help.

So I made another appointment to have a line technician come out and when he arrived at my house with a Bluetooth headset in his ear, the first thing he said was "Gah! I can't get a cell signal in this neighborhood. It sucks!" Personally, I think I deserve at least a gold star for not ripping his arm off and beating him with it.

He assessed the situation and then said, "Just so you know, hooking up this phone line is going to be a b!tch." Is it sad that I just shrugged? I'm now immune to any handyman, mover, electrician, or phone tech saying that something about my house is less that desirable. TELL ME ABOUT IT - I live this dream DAILY.

So three hours later, my phone line was working!! I had a new jack in the second bedroom!! I'm pretty sure that the happiness that I felt is akin to what new mother's feel when they first see their babies for the first time as that is precisely how happy I was. I was GLOWING.

Approximately 15 minutes later, I got my first telemarketing call. And then another one...and then another one. So in the 3 days that I've had service, I've had about forty hundred telemarketing calls and also apparently a stalker (Cynthia Gonzales) who cannot stop calling my house during the day.

To make matters worse, apparently the phones that I have have a ringer setting of "SURE TO MELT YOUR EARDRUM!!!!" and it's next to impossible to turn it down. Seriously. Someone calls my house and it's like the loudest sound EVER echoing off my walls - like the sound out of a science fiction movie where "one guy touched the wrong thing and the world is going to melt in 15 seconds" kind of sound.

So last night, at around 1:38 in the morning, I heard the ring of my phone and finally surrendered my will to live. I'd put up a good fight, but after weighing the effort that it would take to pry a hand away from my ears to actually answer the phone, it seemed like it would just be easier to hold my breath until I passed out. Only the ringing/buzzing/clamoring wouldn't stop.

You'll understand my delight when I found that the guy on the other end of the line was so drunk that it was hard to understand what the words he was slurring together in a "sentence" were supposed to be. Basically, the gist of the phone call was that I was supposed to go ahead and buzz up his girl so the she could go through the back door. I'm pretty sure that that'd code for sex, but at that point, I didn't even care any more. I told him that he had the wrong number and after he repeated some string of numbers that may or may not have been my new number, I reassured him that he did not have the right number. And then, because my day job kicked in, I told him to "take care and have a nice day."

Having a home phone? It's turning out to be the best decision ever.


*There, I said it. I have a boyfriend. And he's fantastic. His concern over me picking out the best and most cost effective phone was just about the cutest thing ever...it almost made this whole ordeal worth it.