Phone Wars

It all began last Thursday. I was innocently sitting at my desk in my office working and I picked up the phone to call someone and noticed the phone was dead. Let me say that better. We have four lines running through my office and all four lines were dead.

Since we have a lot of phones ringing in my office, it’s kind of important to have phones that work.

For some strange reason, our phone system is in the office unit next to our unit. That has never been much of a problem up until last Thursday.

I knew that the tenants who office upstairs in our complex were moving in the bigger office next to us. So my first thought when my phones went out was the electricity had been turned off next door getting ready for the new tenants. So we called our landlord.

He discovered that our entire phone system had been removed by the new tenants. (We later learned they were planning on selling it on Ebay). Not only was our phone system removed but the phone company had removed all our lines coming in from outside. Although our landlord assures us the new tenant was told our phone system was in his office, the new tenant obviously did not understand.

The tenants next door finally called their guy who hooked up their phone system (and disconnected ours) to reconnect our system. After he did that we still had no service because the lines from the outside had to be brought back in the building.

I was trying to practice my Christianity and be very patient until someone got our phones working again. The landlord was blaming the situation on the new tenant and the tenant was blaming the situation on the landlord.

In the meantime, Monday came and we still had no phones.

And my Christianity was starting to wear off.

My assistant called the phone company (on her cell phone) several times on Monday and they finally came in the afternoon to run our lines back in the building. They spent a few hours doing that and when they got finished, one of our lines was still not working. And the one not working happened to be on my desk.

The phone company guy said he had done all he could do. He said the issue was in our phone system and he could not work on those. He said we had to get whoever installed the phone system to come figure out what was wrong.

At our request, the landlord came back to our office.

I asked him who was going to pay for our man to come to our office complex to repair a phone system that was working perfectly until our neighbors took it out. He said the new neighbors should pay for it and it was not his responsibility to pay for it.

By now my Christianity had completely worn off.

I told him I was going to call the company we bought the system from and have him come to repair it and I would pay for it. And I would deduct whatever I pay off next month’s rent. I told him he could work out whether the tenant next door would pay for it or not – that was up to them.

The very calm landlord all of a sudden got very angry. I thought he was going to hit me. I’m glad he didn’t because at that point I was not at all prepared to turn the other cheek.

So we called the man who installed our system 5 years ago and he came today and fixed whatever they messed up in our phone system (in the other office) in about 15 minutes. And he was on his way.

I thought the phone wars were finally over.

I was wrong.

I went to lunch and when I returned our new next door neighbor was in our office. Now one of their lines was not working. He probably thought we told our guy to unhook their phone line, which of course we didn’t.

Now our neighbors are not happy campers.

Before the day ended, I have to tell you I had moved from anger to laughter. We’ve been in this office for over five years and never had a cross word with our landlord or any of our tenant neighbors and now everybody was about ready to fight over the stupid phones. And we will most likely be moving to another place where they appreciate our money a little more.

That just struck me as funny.

I’ll be on the road for a couple of days. I’m pretty sure I’ll have my Christianity back when I return to the office on Friday. But if the landlord points his finger at me again, I’m asking for forgiveness ahead of time.

I’ll kick his butt.