"It never rains, but it pours"

Here we have been wishing for rain, and we get the other sort. You know, when one thing after another happens. Telephones used to be such easy things. At first you just lifted the black, bakelite earpiece, cranked the handle, and asked Emily for the Smith place. Later, you dialed three letters and three or four digits. That was nice and easy to remember, as it comes under the "seven plus or minus two rule" and is "chunked" into letters and numbers. Once you get more than nine digits, however, unless they chunk into memorable sequences say 123-1999 our poor old human brains have difficulty in memorizing them. Especially when there are so many to remember. Consequently, when my cell phone decided to go to the big telephone exchange in the sky, taking with it my electronic directory, I became speechless. Not only couldn't I get calls, and voicemail, I didn't have all those important numbers (my tailor, the Governor's Office, etc.) so that I could let everyone know.

Now for the "... but it pours" bit - our house phone goes down as well! C'est la guerre! Actually, the language was riper, more Anglo-Saxon. Having stirred ourselves into action the day before, we had calls out to the plumber (leak outside the tack room, and the dairy to plumb in), the cow farrier (?), and sundry other important people who just happened to be out when we called. We were incommunicado to the world except for, amazingly, our DSL, which continued to hum away into the ether on the same unresponsive phone line. The phone guy said it was because it only needs a single wire, and the phone needs two (one of which had been cut a mile down the road!) but that sounds way too glib for me. it's those Hertz, electricity has never been the same since they switched from cycles per second. The wonders of modern technology. Come back Emily, you would have remembered all my phone numbers! The awful thing is I now know I have a long, long session in Radio Shack, trying to get my numbers onto my backup phone, getting my old number transferred, and get out without leaving an "arm and a leg" behind.

If you have been trying to call us, well you know why we didn't answer, it never rains but .......!

Photo curtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.