My friend Deirdre once described a list of “petty little yucky picky picky picky problems” she’d gotten back from French localizers, and the phrase promptly entered my repertoire.

Last week we dealt with several of them, most notably with phone lines.

There was a phone line in my kitchen’s ceiling, and it had an amateurish-looking splice job about in the middle of the ceiling: a black electrical-tape job that was yet another of myriad bush-league details Jon et al. have uncovered since starting the job. Black-tape splice jobs are not looked upon with favor by phone guys. George had to add another splice when rewiring the phone jack over the bar, and this he did with Scotch caps, which it turns out are also not looked upon with favor by phone guys.

Enter phone static on Sunday.

Why Sunday? When nothing new was happening? Who knows. But on Sunday I started hearing all kinds of static on my phone line. It got bad enough that it completely disrupted a meeting I was having while working from home on Monday, so I put in a problem ticket with Comcast. Thursday afternoon, Comcast Guy (Brian) came out to look at the problem. Long, long, long, expensive (three hours of labor!) short, there was some kind of problem in the hunk of wiring in the kitchen. Who knows which splice is to blame, or maybe a rat got industrious somewhere between the kitchen and my office, but the solution Jon came up with was to chop that hunk out of the loop, send a new feed to my office (which in turn feeds the upstairs jacks), and try again on the kitchen jack, rewiring it down through the floor (and that peninsula wall) to the feed that Comcast Guy left.

Last two times Comcast came out to service either my phone or ISP service, they either forgot to billl me or service was included. Brian was pretty sure I was going to get billed for that one.

Argh.