An elderly well-to-do couple in my town have a beautifully restored 1880's house, built before electricity and indoor plumbing was available in this part of town. Over the years, lots of "tradesmen" and "experts" have modernized the house. Suffice it to say, that over the last century, there have been many different telephone installations and repairs, resulting in miles of wire of every description being left in, repaired, spliced, removed, re-routed, extended with cords, etc.
They bought a base station with 6 wireless handset/charging station things. They said, on several occasions: "Take out all the unnecessary wires, and just install a brand new jack on the baseboard of the kitchen, where we will plug in the base station."
So, here's what I did: I took out all the unnecessary wires and installed a brand new jack on the base board in the kitchen. I plugged in the base station and voila! dial tone.
Madame then said "Here's the new white wall phone that we want to have over there on the wall of the kitchen. There's already a wire 'over there' so all you need to do is make it work."
The wire that was 'over there' is now rolled up in the garbage bin in my truck. So, out comes the drill, the snake, the staple gun, and the wall jack. A few minutes later, voila! the white phone in the kitchen is working.
They paid the bill with no hesitation, and told me a story about a previous encounter with a "telephone repairman" from AT&T.
Seems they didn't realize that right here in their town is a real telephone man (me) who could have addressed the original complaint, which was static caused by all that old wiring run on the outside and the inside of the house by previous civilizations. They called AT&T who sent a private contractor (unlicensed) who told them that the reason they had static was that all that wire was swinging around loose on the outside of the house, and if it were run in conduit, the static would go away. He stated that he would run all the wires in tubing for a flat rate of $1000.00 (one thousand dollars) but they should not let AT&T know about his offer, because if he did it while working for AT&T, the bill could be twice that amount.
They are older, and not electrically-inclined, but they are also not stupid, and didn't get rich by being the victims of scamsters. They said thanks but no thanks, ran the guy out of their house, and called me, on the advice of a mutual friend.
