Hi, all --
I'm guessing that this is a problem with our phone company (Verizon), but I figured I'd throw this out there in case anyone has had similar ghosts lurking in their homes:
We have one standard phone line; no extras except call waiting. We have a Hot Call box attached to it, with our phone plugged into that.
Last Thursday we had massive electrical storms. The phone line went out while I was on-line between storms. On Friday AM we had no dial tone even at the outdoor box, but after I returned from an errand, lo and behold there was a message on our answering machine and the dial tone was back. I figured that Verizon had fixed us up post-storm, and that was that. Wrong.
On Saturday AM, we lost our dial tone again. We went out an hour later and asked a neighbor two doors down whether she had lost phone either after the storm or that day. No, she hadn't. When we returned home a few hours later, there was still no dial tone, but then suddenly the phone rang, and after hanging up from that call, we again had a dial tone. I believe I was on-line when I lost the connection.
Tonight, the same thing happened. I was on-line and lost my connection. No dial tone again (though you can hear an airy sound in the background). My husband went out to a payphone and called our house. The phone rang, and after answering it and hanging up, bingo -- dial tone again. When the phone has no dial tone, by the way, I believe that outgoing calls cannot be made. I haven't tried it from the phone (just read in an old thread on this newsgroup that you can sometimes call out without a dial tone), but I did unwittingly try to get on-line once without a dial tone, and there was no answer. We are always unable to get a dial tone at the box, too.
Anyway, so I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem. My husband thinks it's related to being on-line, but I'm on-line a lot, so I'm not convinced that that's not just coincidental. I'll give Verizon a call tomorrow, but I'm afraid that they'll want to see the problem in action, and I'm not quite sure how to reproduce it.
Any thoughts?