Do we really need a phone?

Ring! Ring! Ring!

My phone is driving me crazy these days. It has a mind of its own. It will ring, I answer and no one is there. This may happen five times a day or more. We do not have caller ID so I cannot track who it might be. Sometimes I just let the machine grab it. There is usually no message. In between there are, of course, a number of calls that I do get and am able to speak with the caller.

Then, every few days my sister-in-law or a friend, here or there, tells us they tried to call "for hours" only to get a busy signal. Often, we were home and NOT using the phone. Usually we can recall having had no calls at all that evening. We do not have dial up internet service.

We'd like to fix the situation but are having trouble defining just how to describe this problem to the phone company. Should we call them and they come out to service the line and find it working at that time, we will be charged for a service call. If they can find no trouble in the outside lines, we will be charged for a service call. (I sort of believe if the outside line had a problem some of our neighbors would be experiencing the same thing.) If they believe it must be in our personal equipment, we will be charged for a service call. I guess, no matter how you look at it, we will get charged.

Oh, I forgot to mention, it ALWAYS works when we want to call out. It never seems to have a problem when we call on the cell to check messages. Our family and friends have simply learned to call the cell. If it's turned off they can leave a message easily there. They also e-mail as they know we are on the computer a lot.

The more this happens, the more we find we may not really need that phone anyway. For now, we're just going to live with it. The only person it really seems to bother is my sister-in-law. Maybe the phone itself just doesn't want to talk to her!! Hmmmm. Like I said, it has a mind of it's own.