Telephones and Storms

It has come to my attention that a really weird thing happened in the village last week.

We've been having a lot of electrical storms recently, in fact the weather in the whole has been atrocious this year. We are still waiting for the normal sunny weather we usually have at this time of year. It might start of sunny, or end sunny, but in between is another matter entirely!

There was a bad storm with thunder, lightning and rain. I actually saw a fork of lightning landing pretty near or on top of Campo Rosso from my window. I'm a storm watcher, can you guess?

Anyway, it seems that the lightning hit the mast, and knocked the telephones out! Not something I'd know about seeing as I am still waiting for a line. Look at the photo here. I was actually trying to capture a magnificent rainbow that appeared during a recent storm, but I've accidentally captured the proximity of the telephone poles and how close they are to the house. That is my chimney in the picture to the far left, and the nearest pole (not connected to the distant pole) is to the right of the foot of the rainbow. There is actually another pole right outside the garden of the house two doors along, also unconnected.

Now, getting back to the telephone lines in the village, they were knocked out, so Telefonica sent engineers out to re-connect them. All was well until Eileen got a call for Andrea. The caller, English, asked if she had dialled 348. "No, this is 652". Or words to that effect anyway.

Turns out the caller was looking for her mum, who runs the Sonrisa bar. A day or so later, with no-one in her family having phoned her (unusually) Eileen used her mobile to call her home phone, and it didn't ring inside her house. Instead, Andrea from the Sonrisa bar answered. That was when it was realised that the phone numbers had been switched round. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Conversations with others in the village revealed that this had happened to quite a few people, at least those that realised something was amiss.

Telefonica were duly summoned out again, and the phone numbers returned to their rightful owners. But who is to say that someone will not end up paying for an international call they didn't make?

Meanwhile, Eileen found her internet access no longer worked. She called Telefonica who sent an engineer to her home. He fiddled around with her connection box, then announced the problem had been caused by someone changing the wires around and demanded a €50 call-out charge!

She hadn't touched her box,and anyway, explain to me how a DSL user can mess around with wires - doesn't DSL use the same line as the phone line - you can make calls and go online at the same time, unlike dial-up?