Tales From the Milk Drinker

This post comes as per special request by Neil "Fruitcake" Moore. I will be doing a series of short stories about the golden age of my university career when I was attending UPEI taking my engineering Diploma. At that time i lived with the abovementioned and Derrick Desroche in 8G Brown's court.

The first tale I care to share is about our phone.

One day our phone mysteriously stopped working. We couldn't get a dial tone and we didn't recieve any incoming calls (which was odd as I'm sure my mom must've still been calling every day at that point.) We took our phone itself over to Mark Montgomery's place next door and plugged it in to his phone jack and it worked perfectly so we could rule out the idea that the phone's battery was just totally toast. Mark let us use his phone to call Aliant and tell them our phone outlet wasn't working. They said they could make a service call but if it turned out to be a problem with our phone unit (which Derrick owned) we would have to pay for the service fee. Knowing that we had just tested our phone at Mark's and that it worked fine I had no problem telling them to come on over for a service call.

The phone guy made a quick stop in the service room at the end of the appartment and then knocked on our door to tell us to try our phone again. This time it worked fine. He said "ya I thought so. Somehow it just came unplugged in the service room. Since it wasn't in your appartment the service call is free"

I wondered how it could have come unplugged and then I remembered. Brown's court appartments come with phone jacks in every room except the bathrooms, probably because they don't want you trying to install a phone line yourself and end up punching holes in the wall in the process. Well in my room first year (the medium sized room, which I remained in all three years) the phone jack was there but it was only the wires, they hadn't bothered connecting them to the female phone jack end you plug your phone into. I noticed the wire had a little slack in it and that you could wiggle it in and out of the wall about an inch and a half or so.

The wires were right beside my bed and when I would lye in bed at night I would always move them in and out of the wall for fun. I don't know why it was fun, it just was. Well the night before our phone stopped working I had pulled the wire extra hard and about a foot or so of it came out of the wall. Come to think about it there was a satisfying "click" type of feeling right before it released.

When I explained what had happened to Neil he told me to not do it again.