I was on vacation last week and didn't even look much at
Email. Last Monday was Labor Day in the United states which we
celebrate by getting the day off. It's like parking your car in
the driveway and driving on a parkway. Go figure.
Anyway, I needed to get a haircut last Tuesday which is
normally not a cause to post to this list, but the barber shop
had recently moved to a different location in the building where it is
and I heard the barbers talking about how their phone system
wasn't completely up and running yet. They normally had a credit
card machine, a cordless phone, an answering machine and a
regular wired telephone all sharing the same line and now they
didn't have enough jacks to go around.
One of the barbers had bought what he thought was a
3-port splitter which didn't seem to work. I asked him how the
ports were labeled. It turns out what he bought was not what he
really needed. Here, most modern telephone jacks feed two actual
lines to your phone. One pair of wires is the primary pair and
is usually blue and white while the secondary pair is orange and
white and is often-times not even connected to anything unless
you have a second phone line in which case, that's it.
The new splitter he had bought fed the primary pair to
one jack, both pairs to the middle jack, and the second line to
the third jack.
We kind of left it at that but the wheels were slowly
spinning in my head and I had a thought. After the haircut was
over, I asked if I could look at their setup because there might
be a way to get it all to work again.
It occurred to me that the credit card machine just
might have a spare RJ11 jack that fed the phone line which came
in to the machine back out so someone could plug a phone in when
the machine was not in use, just like old dial-up modems used to
be.
The barber said that was fine and showed me the card
machine. It is a box about the size of a telephone with a round
housing on top for the roll of paper tape, a key pad and slot
for a credit card.
I looked on the bottom where the phone line plugged in
and there was not one but three unused jacks. Two of them may
have been RJ45 Ethernet jacks as they are about the same size. I
know that plugging the wired phone in to them accomplished
nothing. The next jack was occupied by the actual phone line
cord and the final jack was vacant. When I plugged the phone and
answering machine there, we had dial tone.
The problem was solved. I had the barbers try a credit
card to make sure the machine still worked and then call the
number to test the answering machine and that all worked.
Too bad I didn't get a bit knocked off the price of the
hair cut, but it was only about 5 or 10 minutes of
trouble-shooting, so I feel like I was useful.
When I got back home, Beverly said that my father had
rented a jack hammer to break up some concrete that had been the
base of a flag pole in his yard. The pole had been bent over in
late July as a result of a high wind storm and we needed to make
the old base go away.
The jack hammer weighed about 60 pounds or 3 stones or
around 25 KG so it was a job to lift.
I have always wanted to try a jack hammer since I was
about six years old and it was as fun as I thought it would be
except for one secret which I will share.
If you let the hammer point embed itself in the broken
concrete and Earth, it gets stuck and is almost impossible to
get un-stuck.
We got that jack hammer stuck several times and that was
the real work. You can shake it from side to side and eventually
get it out, but it once got so stuck that I had to release the
hammer point from the machine and pull the machine off the
point.
We then had to use a sledge hammer and a regular hammer
to slowly chip enough concrete from around the jack hammer point
to loosen it. We even poured water in the hold and I finally
worked it out.
The points are steel bars shaped exactly like a pencil.
On one end, there is either a chisel point which looks like a
screwdriver or a sharp point like a sharpened pencil. Either one
destroys concrete beautifully and either one can get stuck to
the point where you think the Earth was built around it and it
will never come out.
By the time it got stuck for the last time, my body felt
as if I had been beaten up. The jack hammer vibrates
tremendously and lifting it up to unstick it finally wears your
arms and shoulder muscles out.
We did get the remains of the flag pole out of the hole
and enough of the concrete busted up that we can fill it in and
we will dig a new hole to get the pole further away from the
tree that did that first one in.
As I dragged my aching body home last Tuesday, I felt
like it had been a good and successful day. The barber's had a
working phone system. My father's flag pole was ready for
replacement. After I got all the dirt and concrete dust and
grease from the jack hammer off of me and slept, I felt good
again.
Well, I had better get back to work. I was waiting for a
piece of software to install on a slow system and it just
finished.
Martin
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