Trouble is waiting...

Where, o where, is Ma Bell? We have been without phone service for two days, and the Verizon Trouble Report Status page says only that "Trouble is waiting to be dispatched to a technician." Waiting, and waiting, and waiting. I can only imagine a knitter, impatiently tapping her foot as she knits, waiting to be dispatched. This cartoon from A Good Yarn portrays it pretty well.

In the "olden days," the phone line almost never went dead. One the rare occasions that it did, the phone company repaired it the same day. Yet this is the third time in the last three or four months we have lost our phone service, and each time it took two days before it was repaired. (Once we were away, and it was out for over two weeks.) At least this time they didn't insist that we wait at home for their repairman to show up.