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There are better ways to meet neighbors

Seems like a Hudson man's phone line was crossed with a neighbor's Internet line. So whenever he made a call, he overheard his neighbors' pizza orders and arguments.

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published February 27, 2006

HUDSON - Tommy Rawlings and Judy Perez were gossiping on the phone a couple of weeks ago when they suddenly heard the voice of another woman on their line. The other woman ordered a cheese and pepperoni pizza from Domino's, but no bread sticks.

Perez broke into the woman's conversation.

"Where are you?" Perez asked.

"On Kitten Trail," the woman answered. That road is a couple of miles from the Brentwood Estates Mobile Home Park where Rawlings and Perez live. "You're talking on our line."

"No," Perez said, "you're talking on our line."

Then the four tried to talk over one another.

"It was ridiculous," Perez said of her 1950s-reminiscent return to party line status.

You may remember Rawlings, Perez and their Brentwood Estates neighbors from a December Pasco Times story that chronicled their three years of erratic phone service. The park residents, frustrated with Verizon's failure to fix their phones, had resorted to yelling across the street or Morse code taps.

Verizon had blamed weather and age for damaging the equipment that connected the park, located off New York Avenue, to one of the phone company's larger transmission centers. Past repairs had not endured. By December's end, though, the faulty hardware appeared fixed.

Folks at Brentwood Estates got on with their telecommunication lives - until last weekend.

Then a reporter got an e-mail from the 53-year-old Rawlings. The subject line read:

"The Amazing World of Verizon."

"The phones are working," Rawlings wrote. "In fact they are "over-working!"'

His line, it seemed, was picking up other people's conversations. Suddenly, he felt nostalgic. He was a child again, when phone lines shared by multiple households created more "party" than privacy.

Some highlights from Rawlings' Feb. 19 e-mail:

--"On Feb. 14, Valentine's Day, while talking to my doctor's office, a very irate wife was very upset with her husband, Ted, because he had not made plans to take her out to dinner. I spoke up and told her that she and her husband were on my line with the doctor. She got upset with me and told me to hang up. I did. Mainly because I felt sorry for Ted.

--"On Feb. 17, while talking to the contractor who is installing my patio windows, a senior citizen started talking to her daughter that she was having "bladder' problems."

The situation, Verizon spokesman Bob Elek acknowledged, is unusual. Party lines are essentially nonexistent at this point, though in 1950 they made up 75 percent of all U.S. telephone lines.

Verizon stopped offering party lines "a long time ago," Elek said. But "that's exactly what it seems like. We for the life of us can't understand how something like this could happen."

Rawlings' complaint seemed to be the only one of its kind from Brentwood Estates. But Verizon dutifully instructed a technician to investigate. As fate would have it, Rawlings said, the technician's call interrupted a conversation between Rawlings and neighbor Lorna McFarland.

"All of a sudden, we hear this voice," McFarland recalled later. "I said, "Oh, it's happening again."'

Last Monday, Verizon rerouted Rawlings' phone to try to pinpoint the problem. In an e-mail on the same day, Elek sounded like he was describing phone service to Timbuktu: "I've not seen it, but I understand Brentwood Estates is pretty far out there."

Rawlings lives 8 miles from a Verizon store in Gulf View Square mall.

Tuesday, during a conversation with Rawlings, a reporter heard other ring tones on the line several times. The same day, a Verizon employee told Rawlings the company wanted "to treat him like gold."

But when the problem continued to baffle all involved on Wednesday, a supervisor said he would need to send out the company's "copper guys."

That inspired frustration in Rawlings, and another comic e-mail to the Times.

"DO I HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE ENTIRE "PERIODIC TABLE OF ELEMENTS' TO GET MY PHONE FIXED??????"

Elek, the Verizon spokesman, said a lot of people were spending a lot of time looking for a solution.

"It just sounds like something that's going to take a complete top to bottom look to figure out what's going on," he said.

* * *

Postscript: Verizon finally fixed the problem Thursday.

About 2 p.m., two Verizon trucks pulled up outside Rawlings' home.

"Are you the copper guys?" Rawlings asked.

"No," they said. "We are the garbage men."

They told him they solved problems other technicians couldn't.

According to Elek, here's what they found: A nearby resident had ordered DSL Internet service, and the technician installing it crossed that line with Rawlings'. So the "garbage men" were sent to uncross the lines.

Rawlings took the news with hesitant optimism.

"I'll always wonder," he said, "if that woman took care of her bladder problem."

--Colleen Jenkins can be reached at 727 869-6236 or cjenkins@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 27, 2006, 02:15:26]