Our home phone is back to working condition after more than a week of being out. The tech couldn't find anything wrong, so he suspects that somehow the wiring between our apartment and the junction box downstairs got damaged, either by humans or rodents. It took him an hour and a half of coming into our apartment, then going downstairs to test, then back up again, but he was able to find an older wiring system to hook our phone into so we're back in business. I asked him if he enjoyed the challenge of trying to fix things and he said that he used to, but now doing 16 housecalls a day was catching up with him.
In related news, I have joined the twentieth century and purchased myself a fancy cell phone! Ok, so really it's a prepaid phone, and the cheapest one they had (there it is in all its glory on the right). I won't be using it for chatting much (at 10 cents a minute) and I don't get any free calls at nights or on the weekends. But I still feel really cool.
