Kelly called yesterday and we chatted a bit. She’s in the home stretch of her pregnancy and sounded great. She sounds upbeat and happy and her excitement was contagious. You go Kelly! Sounds like everything is going well, but she’s not exactly sure when the kid will drop. No worries, she’s enjoying it…
Something rather odd happened while we were talking, twice. I was on the phone downstairs for the conversation. It’s one of those old, rotary dial phones in Ma Bell beige. Rick has an irrational love of that thing, he’s had it forever and swears that he’ll always have it. Anyway, the way those phones work is like this; when you pick up the phone, a voltage is caused to rise on the line. Nowadays, that voltage is converted into digital signals so that the digital networks can use the information. It used to be that the voltage would stay elevated as long as the phone was being used, the same thing would happen when someone called you. The higher voltage caused the phone to ring and kept the line active. Back in the day, if the feds wanted to trace your line, they would cause the voltage to rise on the line until they could identify where the call was coming from. The thing is that with the voltage elevated, you couldn’t hang up! If you took the handset out of the modem (remember those days?) and put it into the handset, the phone wouldn’t hang up, it would ring! Even if you took the phone out of the wall, the line would remain active until they decreased the voltage…
Well, I was talking to Kelly when the “call waiting” signal came on and she was disconnected. There was nothing on the line but the “beep beep” of the call waiting signal. I tapped the handset to see who was calling and it switched over, but all I heard was a staticy “room” sound. No one responded to my “Hello?”, so I went back to what was supposed to be Kelly. There was nothing except the call waiting signal! I hung up and the phone rang! When I picked it up it was the call waiting signal. Hmmm… I hung up again and the phone was quiet for a second, and then it rang again! This time it was Kelly. We resumed our conversation, and when it was over, I hung up, and the phone rang as soon as I put it down in the cradle! There was nothing on the other end of the line and when I hung up it stayed quite.
I’m under no illusions that all text messages that I send to the US are screened. I’m also assuming that my emails are as well. That’s part of the cost of living in Yemen I suppose. I wouldn’t be surprised if the boys from the NSA were listing to me while I’m at home. They must be bored to tears… Anyway, I do wish that they’d be a little more subtle about it if they were behind my phone issues, that was really annoying!:-)