Fixing a Telephone System

Ken and I went to Shymkent last week to fix the telephone system in Shymkent. Working with telephones is another fun skill that I have acquired over the years I have lived in Kazakhstan. Ken deals with the wiring, while I deal with the programming side of making sure the systems work the way we want. It is fun, yet can also be frustrating.

Ken and I spent 1 1/2 days in Shymkent. We set up new phones and fixed a few things that had gone wrong since the system was set up a couple years ago. At one point the phone line that we were working with went completely dead. When we called the phone company, they said that they knew about the problem (they had cut the line) and would send someone out to fix it. This just happened to be on the one day we came all the way from Taraz to fix phones. Well, we went about the other tasks that we could work on and just hoped we were not messing something up.

When the telephone man came, he first blamed our phone system. He said that our phone system was sending an electrical current through the line and that caused them to have to shut it down. After some frustrating conversations in the phone room and in the attic where the lines come into the building he admitted that they were having some technical difficulties at the station and would try to restore the line later in the evening. At about 5:30 everything started to work correctly. Ken and I spent a little more time that evening fixing things up and were able to leave fairly early in the morning the next day after having checked to make sure everything was the way they wanted it to be.

Our drive back was filled with amazing beauty. It had just rained in Shymkent, so we could see the mountains really clearly. The fields were green, which is something that we look forward to each spring, since it only lasts for a month or two. During our drive, we caught up to the storm and so we got to see some pretty neat clouds as well. It was a nice trip, although I was pretty tired when we returned.