I had to get the internet installed in my place recently. It was a surprisingly difficult process, primarily because my place had no phone hookup.

I talked to several of my neighbours who knew the previous tenants, and they confirmed that my place was, indeed, capable of supporting a phone. I looked on the wall where they thought the phone might have been, and discovered the remnants of a phone cable, and a notch in the paint that looks like it might’ve once supported a phone jack.

Hurrah!

So I went out and bought a phone jack and wire strippers and set out to install a phone jack like a bad-ass.

Unfortunately, it turns out the wire I found led to…nowhere. Yep. It was just a strip of wire that had been severed at both ends.

Undaunted, I went outside and found the network interchange box that the phone company installed for the building. I traced the gigantic mass of wires leading out of the interchange box up the fire escape to a landing just outside my door, to a second switch box. I found the cables that led from the switch box inwards to my apartment. Only to find… that the cable poking out of the wall was 1. barely half an inch long, and 2. totally painted over.

No big. So I messed around with the cable leading from the second switch box until I got enough slack to be able to feed it through a bit more. Then I stripped the first, fake, telephone wire and connected it to the pathetic stub of the live wire, and connected the other end to the phone jack.

Still no internet. I cry a little, then re-check the box that the phone jack had come in.

I’d wired the colours wrong. Of course.

Anyway, after rewiring the cables, I get: a blinking DSL light! And tears of joy.

So right about now my ego’s the size of the former USSR, and I fully expect the president of the planet earth to call me at any moment offering me their job. You mean, she’s smart, she’s pretty, she blogs and writes and codes and draws and bikes ten miles like a bad-ass, she’s got a middle name with the letters ‘y’ and ‘x’ in them, and she installs telephone wiring? I thought people like that only existed in badly written YA stories?!