One of the things we noticed during the latter part of our trip was that our telephone land line seemed to be malfunctioning. There was a lot of static on the line. I called AT&T and they said a repairman would be out Wednesday. That is no big deal because we hardly ever use that telephone. It is for our alarm system and for emergencies.

To my surprise a repairman showed up at the door this morning and was here to help. Since he was not from the government, there was a very good chance that he actually was here to help. He went out to the junction box and started testing. Sure enough, there was a problem (we knew that) and it was with the AT&T equipment which is a good thing. They fix that stuff for free.

After getting the AT&T equipment working he helped troubleshoot the residual static on the line. I went and started unplugging phones. Turns out we had five land lines in addition to the one with the answering machine. One of them proved to be a bad actor, and the is the subject of today's photo. I don't know how long we have had this phone, but it is no longer connected. The reason for the problems with all the phones is the ringer circuits in them. If you have a bunch of them they can start looking like an open circuit since they are all hooked up in parallel. The best solution is a wireless phone with plenty of remotes. That means only one device is hooked up to the phone line.