This, of course, is assuming yours is the simplest possible case of a jack for a single analog telephone line. Anything fancier, I wouldn't mess with, unless you have electronic expertise.

My need for a new telephone jack became apparent during the course of a home-redecorating chain-reaction I set in motion when I moved my bed into the other room. Suddenly, it became feasible to have the computer and modem at one end of the erstwhile bedroom, and the telephone, sharing the same line with the modem, in a reading nook at the opposite end of the room. The jack was on the wall between.

To implement my plan, I bought two new telephone cables and one of those adapter plugs with the two sockets, for the phone jack. The idea was to plug the two cables into the adapter, and thread one each to the modem and the voice line. Fine, but the new cables didn't work.

"They're defective," said the friend who was helping me. "You notice, the modem worked fine with the old cable."

I didn't think it was quite so simple.

"It might be that the new plug and the old socket just need to get used to each other."

My friend smiled quizzically.

"They do refer to 'male' and 'female' plugs, but it's a purely mechanical coupling," he said.

After my friend left, I jiggled each new plug in turn in the jack, and in the adapter, and finally raised a dial tone. Only problem was, I had to physically hold the plug in the socket at just the right angle to preserve the dial tone. This made me suspect that the socket in the jack was worn-out.

I unscrewed the old jack, first its casing, then the plate behind it. I looked at the three grubby live telephone wires--red, green, and yellow, braided together. They had been threaded into the baseboard at the construction of my building in 1939. They represented the deepest physical layer of the internet, the "reptile brain" that made every subsequent connection possible. I was witnessing a kind of power.

I spent considerable time with an Xacto knife, scraping the wires clean, then I wound them about the color-coded terminals of the new jack. I screwed the jack together. Holding my breath, I plugged the new cable, connected to my phone, into the new jack-socket. The hardware of different epochs worked together to give me a clean and persistent dial tone, which meant I could also surf, blog, and email.

The informal workers' phrase to describe a seamless mechanical coupling, a "papa-mama fit," is crude enough to provoke smiles. It is also deeply reverent.
6:53:43 AM    comment []