The Mysterious Room

It’s not that remarkable. As a telephone company repair technician I’ve been in thousands of houses, met thousands of customers, and fixed thousands of broken, deteriorated lines, jacks, and telephone sets. I have maybe a dozen or two funny stories. (Either “funny haha or “funny mysterious.”) Pretty low percentage. 

Well, maybe more. More come to you as you tell them, like telling jokes in a bar. “Reminds me of the time . . .” 

The one I was thinking about today concerned a customer who called in a report that his “phone was dead.” Obviously, a common malady in this line of business. The telephone company ran automated tests on reported lines and the result on this one was, short. 

Seven or eight times out of ten, a short in the absence of a ground and/or stray voltage meant the problem was going to be in a phone jack or wiring inside the house, so when I arrived  and no one was home, I walked around to the back to see if I could isolate the trouble to the house wiring, leave a “no access” card and move on to another job. 

Sure enough one of the inside wires had a short on it. There were a few inside wires going off in different directions, stapled to the siding, and I could see that the bad one led to what was probably a bedroom in a back corner of the house. I left it disconnected and hooked everything else back up—any other phones would work OK now—and wrote up a no access card. 

As I was about to hang the tag on the front doorknob, a car pulled into the driveway and a guy got out. I told him who I was and explained to him that his problem was caused by one of the lines running into his house and that I needed to go inside in order to fix it. 

OK, he said, and he opened the house up and let me inside. I saw a door that was obviously leading to the back bedroom where that bad line was headed, and I stepped toward it, saying something like, I'll need to check in here. 

He panics. “No!” he said. “Don’t go in there!”  He trotted toward the door to put himself between it and me.  “It’s OK. Don’t go in there!  Just leave that wire disconnected. I don’t need it. Just never mind.  You can go on. It’s good.” Or words to that effect. 

That’s my story. Once in awhile I wonder what the hell was going on in there, because I left as he suggested, never did go back, and never found out.