Internet Phone Service

I guess I should start this off with: we live in the boonies. If you live in the boonies [anywhere outside of "town"] you accept the fact that some things just cost more in the boonies. Phone service is one of those things.

We were paying [including all taxes, surcharges, and miscellaneous graft] about $65/mth just to have a land line to our house. That included NO long distance.

One day in January a nice lady came around passing out photocopied flyers about new phone service from the cable company. We already have digital cable and internet service from them and they now are offering phone service for $30/mth with unlimited long distance to anywhere in US and Canada for free. SIGN ME UP!

I call her back and tell her that we definitely want this service and to sign us up. A week later I get a return call saying she had taken care of it and our installation date was 2 months out! WTF?!?!?!? 2 months? You must be kidding me. Sigh. Ok, I wait.

Well about 2 weeks before my scheduled install date I get a call saying that we never confirmed our desire to switch carriers - you know that phone call where they tape everything and you have to say YES I want to change about a brazillian times - and we must do that before they can come out to change over the service. Fine. Call me and I will do that. Yes, ma'am we can do that but we will have to reschedule your installation date as well. WTF?!?!?!??! You must be kidding me. So my install date gets moved back another 3 weeks. I guess I should be glad it wasn't 2 months.

The nice cable guy shows up with my handy dandy phone modem and we do the whole install thing. We had to split the line at the phone jack to handle the modem and the fax/printer/scanner/copier machine. Well the minute we hooked up the fax things we crazy. For whatever reason they did not like one another. We goofed around with it a little and came to the conclusion that it was the cable. Installed another cable and they seemed to get along just fine.

Flash forward 6 months. My mother is visiting and needs to fax a document. I happily slap said document into the fax/printer/scanner/copier machine and away we DON'T GO. Come on I thought we had this all figured out a long time ago. Sigh. Looks like the modem and fax machines [or the splitter between the two] are incompatible. Truly, a small price to pay for cheap phone service but sometimes I wish technology wasn't so incompatible with my lifestyle.

I'm going to try buying a new splitter and see if that doesn't improve the situation. Until then, it's plan B: off to use the inlaw's fax/printer/scanner/copier machine. Here's hoping I don't break their machine.

Edit: It appears the problem with in the power cord to the printer. This printer would consisitantly freak out whenever the power went out. I ended up disconnecting the power cord from the printer and reconnecting it [advice from the online support at HP, HP ROCKS!] and suddenly the damn thing works fine. Go figure.