Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island
Chapter 10- Telephone Trouble
I will not eat that, Sam I am.
- Dr. Seuss, "Green Eggs and Ham"
Before me is a tray filled with bowls and plates of food. But something is wrong. Terribly wrong.
Stephanie notices it first. "It's twitching!" she gasps, and then bursts out laughing.
She's right. Below me on the high table sits a bowl of what the menu billed as tofu, battered and fried and soaking in a dark, glossy sauce. And yet the whole bowl seems to be slowly breathing. I can't quite pick out what is moving, but it's clear that down in the depths of the bowl, something is slowly throbbing away.
I stare at the bowl for what seems like hours, but it never stops or slows its rhythmic pulsing. Finally, I look up at Stephanie, who has finally managed to control herself. The disbelief, incomprehension, and downright fear that is written all over my face sends her off into hysterics again.
The day had started auspiciously. I had spent the night before on the internet, uploading Chapter 9. After a good 45 minutes getting the new stuff uploaded, and getting the old links changed to point to the new page, consigning another $ 10.80 to Palaunet's grubby electronic coffers, I went to call Stephanie. That afternoon, leaving work, Jill, Steph, and I had discussed going diving this weekend. None of us had been out in three weeks, and we were running out of weekend entertainment. The burden to coordinate the trip fell to Jill, who is clearly the most organized of our triumvirate, and she was going to call the two of us that evening to let us know if something was available. I figured that since I had tied up the phone all night on the computer, Stephanie would have gotten the call. I picked up the phone, punched the buttons, and waited.
And waited. No ringing noise, no busy signal, no strange clicking noises that herald that a connection is reluctantly being forged by the used-to-be-state-of-the-art telephone switching equipment. Just the sound of my own breath, picked up at the mouthpiece and amplified at my ear, presumably for my own enjoyment. The phone was dead.
This had happened a few days ago, during a storm. The phone was dead when I picked it up to call someone. I forcefully hung it up, thinking that it was just being surly and tried again, but no luck. When I checked again about an hour later, it greeted me with a warm, silky dial tone, as if nothing had happened between us. But tonight, the weather was relatively calm, and besides, I had just disconnected it from the computer less than two minutes ago, and it was working fine then.
Had I forgotten to plug the phone back in after disconnecting the computer? Such negligence had hounded me in the past, but the phone was properly connected to the house's only telephone line, which snaked up from an unseen hole in the roof over the kitchen somewhere, trailed listlessly down the wall and across the counter, and ended abruptly a scant ten feet later. I gave the receiver button a nice, long press, thinking the line just needed to be reset, but nothing happened. Then I decided to click it several times quickly, like they did in the movies when the phone didn't work, but that also failed to produce the required result. Stupid Hollywood.
So I gave up. Ok, it's Palau. The phone goes out sometimes. Hell, the power had gone out at least once a week since I'd been here, staying off for about a half hour or so. The blackouts gave me ample time to enjoy the grinding whir of the noisy generator powering the American embassy across the street, just in case an American wandered in, in need of important services. Like phone service, which this particular American currently lacked. An hour later, I tried the phone again. Still nothing. Another half hour after that, and I started to be annoyed. Sure, the phone or the power went out sometimes, but it always came back, and the delay seemed to be calculated to be just long enough to make you appreciate having it when it came back on.
But being stuck for 90 minutes went beyond helping me appreciate it, and began coming perilously close to being just an annoying pain in the ass. I played some pointless computer games for a while to pass the time, and was temporarily distracted from the phone difficulties by a Russian rocket tank brigade that was threatening my American outpost on the moon, but the pesky Commies apparently weren't preoccupied with whether their phone worked and quickly cut me to shrapnel. I tried the phone again after I was buried with full military honors, but was still greeted with silence. Finally, I gave up and went to bed with the door open, forsaking air conditioning so that I'd be able to hear if the phone finally rang and freed me from my telecommunications gulag.
Morning came, and my body, strictly as a precautionary measure, woke me up around 8:00 a.m., just in case the call came to be ready for a 9:00 a.m. boat departure. I climbed out of bed, and enjoyed a brief scratch and adjustment on my way to the kitchen, figured that if diving was going to happen, Stephanie would certainly be awake by now. But the phone still refused to drone a dial tone at me, and I slammed it down in disgust. The mild adrenaline rush from the slamming cleared out the last remnants of sleep, allowing me to think clearly.
"I bet they tried to call last night and this morning, couldn't reach me, and they probably just decided to go without me," I thought. "Those bitches. I'll kill them."
Hmm. That seemed a shade aggressive. Not to mention gratuitously misogynistic. For all I knew, they clearly understood that I wanted to go, and would probably swing by to make sure I was ok and to pick me up. I decided not to kill them, at least for the time being, and sheepishly recanted the "bitches" remark as well. But by 8:30 a.m. there was still no knock on the door, which meant no diving. To get to the dive sites, most of which are a good 40 minute boat ride from Koror, do two dives, lunch, and come back, boats left the dive shops by 9:00 a.m. and there was no way to get down to a shop and get gear loaded onto a boat in less than half an hour. I resigned myself that there was to be no diving today, made a detour to the bathroom, tried the phone again unsuccessfully when I got back, and flopped back into bed.
By 11:00 a.m., I was sweeping the past three weeks' worth of grit off the tile floors when I decided to check the phone again. For the first time in over twelve hours, the warm 220 cycle dial tone honked away in my ear. I figured I'd call Stephanie, and leave a scathing message on her answering machine, berating her for leaving me behind. But within two rings, she answered.
Diving hadn't gone forth, partly because of my phone problem, and partly because Jill wasn't feeling well anyway. So Stephanie was biding her time at home while a Filipino maid scrubbed the remains of Rick, the other outgoing clerk who had previously inhabited her apartment, out of the more desirable of the two bathrooms. Now, full of regret over the thought of killing them, much less the unfortunate expletive, I tried to balance my karma by offering to pick up my still-carless co-worker up for a trip down to the hardware store.
I stopped by what now was officially "her" apartment, and listened to her lament the lack of sufficient furniture to fill the four cavernous rooms, and gripe about the water that seemed to leak under the sliding glass doors in each bedroom that led to not one, but two private decks looking majestically out over the Rock Islands. I expressed what little sympathy I could muster for her, stuck in such an thoroughly undesirable apartment. We decided to move what little furniture she had to a more appealing distribution among the four rooms, then a trip to the hardware store, and later, dinner together, since, frankly, neither of us had anything better to do.
The trip lingered on into the afternoon, as I made it a point the offer her access to the grocery store as well. I remembered being car-less for my first few days here, and for years on end in college, and figured that she would appreciate the opportunity. I also figured I'd spare her the indignity of needing to ask if we could stop for a few groceries on the way back. Then we tooled it up to Airai ("Eye-rye," the most southern state in Babeldaob, home of the north end of the K-B Bridge and the Palau airport) to look at some used cars she had gotten a lead on. By the time we got back, it was nearly 6:00 p.m. Figuring she was getting tired of having me around all day, I was getting ready to leave when she asked if we were still on for dinner. "Sure," I said. "What've you got in mind?"
We extensively debated whether she, by virtue of simply suggesting dinner, was therefore relieved of any further decision-making obligations (her position) or whether, by initiating the idea, she was thus required to carry the planning all the way through to completion (my position). I finally gave in, and suggested that we try a place called "Dragon Tei," a small Japanese restaurant in our end of town that had a pretty good reputation.
From the outside, the Dragon Tei looks like a nasty little white shack, tacked on as an afterthought to the front of a larger, but equally nasty white shack. The only windows in the whole building are covered with bars, and the roof slopes down sharply towards the front of the building, suggesting that the ceiling in the front half of the building provides barely enough room to stand upright. The whole place appears to be built slightly crooked, but it may just be an optical illusion, created by a structure that just can't muster up the effort to stand up straight. They have a neat little hand-painted sign, a brown dragon created by dabs with a paint-soaked sponge, but on the whole, it was hard to anticipate anything good happening inside. Then again, if anything, Palau has taught me not to judge an establishment by its exterior.
We showed up around 7:30 p.m., and managed to grab the last spot in the open field next to the building that served as a "parking area, customers only." Walking around to the front, we encountered a challenge before we even got in. The door, which consisted of small windows in a thick wooden frame, neither pushed in, nor pulled out. Fortunately, instinctive ancestral traces of chivalry had subconsciously convinced me to let Stephanie lead the way to the door, and thus, she was left to grapple with the puzzle the door posed.
Just as we both were starting to become convinced that we had waited too long, and that they had stopped letting new patrons in for the night, a small Japanese woman in a white jumpsuit inside the restaurant noticed our distress and hurried up to the door, sliding it laterally to let us in. She mumbled apologetically through a shy grin about not seeing us, and quickly hurried to gather menus. From where we stood, we could see a stone path in the dirt floor of the foyer, leading off to three separate dining areas. Along the path were two dozen pairs of shoes, neatly arranged. Of course--the traditional Japanese custom of removing one's shoes inside. The same one that cost me my boat shoes at the Seebee camp. I gestured at the hostess, miming removing my sandals, but she shook her head, which I took to mean that it wasn't necessary, and she silently escorted us into a dining room, gesturing to take any table at all.
The inside of the restaurant was surprisingly elegant, especially considering my expectations based on its exterior. Not "elegant" in the sense of tablecloth-silver-crystal, but "elegant" in a more sparse Zen-kind of style. The high, black wood tables held nothing but a porcelain glass containing napkins and chopsticks. The sloping roof, which looked dizzying and claustrophobic from the outside, created a stylish tilted ceiling on the inside. From the cieling, long bamboo curtains stretched across the rafters over a long, sleek, black wooden bar, a large koto drum sitting at the end. The stone path that led from the foyer into the dining area had turned into a rough-hewn cobblestone floor, and the air inside seemed fresh and cool, as if it wafted about on a gentle breeze, not the chilly breeze that blows through an air conditioner. The entire dining room had a peaceful nature about it, it almost felt like we were sitting on a quiet outdoor porch under the stars. The gentle murmur of the dining room was broken only by occasional excited outbursts from a large contingent of Asians in an adjacent dining room, sitting Japanese-style on a riser at low tables with their bare feet tucked under them.
Stephanie and I exchanged complimentary observations about the setting, and finally broke open the menus. The first page was all in Japanese characters. So was the second. And the third. And so on. It was only after flipping through several pages that English words slowly started to appear, and eventually, shared the last few pages with their Japanese counterparts. The top of one page cryptically exclaimed in large, underlined letters "No Vegetarian Menu," yet the opposite page listed several dishes under the heading "Vegetables." The "No Vegetarian" page went on to trumpet the prix fixe, family-style dinner of numerous courses of miso soup, sashimi, various seafood entrees, Japanese pickles (?), etc. etc., for a mere $50 per person.
We had recently attended a similar banquet-style meal at going away dinner for Rick given by the Chief Justice at another local Japanese restaurant. There, for $25 each, we were served an endless profusion of fish-type dishes: sashimi, broiled crabs and lobsters, sweet and sour fish, boiled squid and vegetables, blah blah blah. Every time we assumed that we'd seen the last of the entrees, a waitress would come by with another steaming plate of some other bounty of the sea, until we just broke out in hysterics every time the girl improbably showed up with a new plate. It was a good meal (based on the abundance of fish and the relative inabundance of vegetables in restaurants here, I've had to compromise my vegetarian beliefs from a "no fish restriction" to a "no fish preference"), but Stephanie and I agreed that there was no way, no matter how much better Dragon Tei's food might be, that one could never eat $50 worth of food. In college, we might have come close, certainly denting the local Ponderosa to the tune of maybe $35 worth of mediocre steaks and overcooked pasta, but $50 at Dragon Tei was out of the question.
Of course, even $30 could get you something interesting there. The menu offered "Bat Soup" at "$32 per bat." We had been told of this earlier: most upscale restaurants here offered a soup including a whole fruit bat carcass sitting in the bowl. A fruit bat is a common animal around here-- apparently, it's a bat that eats fruit. Hence the name. Inspired, huh? Nobody apparently ever went so far as to actually eat the bat (or, in most cases, the soup); rather it was mostly a photo opportunity primarily for Asian tourists to have their pictures taken holding up a big, dead, hairy bat and smiling. Over the course of our meal, we located at least three tables that, by the popping of the flashbulbs and the squeals of surprise and comic repulsion, must have shelled out their $30 each for the privilege. I was amazed, not so much at the fact that people would order something so absurd-- hell, people on vacation do all kinds of odd things thinking that they're being exotic-- but at the idea that somewhere, back in the kitchen, there was a whole freezer full of dead fruit bats, waiting to be thawed out in the microwave and plunked in a bowl of soup for $30 a pop. Of course, for all I knew, maybe they just had a couple of bat carcasses that they recycled as they returned to the kitchen, inevitably uneaten.
After grappling with the menu for a several minutes, Steph and I both settled on full dinners at about $18 each, about midway up the price ladder for this particular establishment, but pricey by general Palau standards. I went with the "Tofu Dinner" which offered a sampling of the two major tofu dishes on the menu, and a bevy of side dishes. Stephanie and I relaxed over drinks while we waited for our food, and seemed to finally be getting beyond the awkward, just-getting-to-know-someone-new phase. The conversation flowed easily, particularly when she got me off into talking about my marriage and its decline. Of course, that story, fascinating as it is to me, most certainly bores non-participants to death after a few minutes. Either Stephanie was actually interested in hearing about it, or she put on a convincing show, because I blathered on about it for a good 20 minutes until the food arrived.
At this point, if you've forgotten the hook that started this chapter, now might be a good time to refresh your recollection. We'll wait.
After studying the pulsating bowl of tofu for a few minutes, I finally determined that the illusion of twitching came from the big pink shavings of tuna that garnished the top. Cut paper-thin, the flakes slowly curled and uncurled as small thermal currents rising from the warm sauce caused them to shrivel up and the expand again. The net effect was really eerie, and somewhat unappetizing, as you couldn't help but feel that, just under the surface of the shiny, opaque sauce, some miniature Leviathan was lucking beneath your dinner. After about 10 minutes of Stephanie laughing and me nervously poking at it, just to make sure that one of the fruit bats hadn't awakened from its frozen slumber and snuck into the bowl of tofu, the slices of tuna settled down enough for me to start eating it, albeit warily.
But the twitching bowl of tofu was only half the amusement in front of me. The other tofu entree was listed on the menu as something having to do with tofu "bathed in hot water," which I had gotten a laugh out of pointing out on the menu. But there it was-- five or six cubes of tofu in . . . well, in a bowl of hot water, partially hiding under a floating lettuce leaf. Laid helpfully alongside the bowl was a small metal strainer, about the size of a spoon, that looked like a tiny aluminum flyswatter. I was pretty sure that I was expected to fish the cubes out of the water with the strainer, but beyond that, I was stumped. Was I just supposed to eat just the hunks of warm, wet tofu? Did I dip it in the bowl of unspecified sauce on the other side of the tray? Eat it with rice? Squash it with the flyswatter like Play-Doh until neat little patterns extruded through the mesh?
Lacking good advice from my dining companion, who just seemed to get endless amusement out of watching me grapple with my dinner, I decided to just go ahead and dunk it in the mystery sauce. If I was committing a faux pas, tough luck. Next time, they should give you instructions on how to eat it. I did the best I could to pick up the slippery, fragile globs of tofu, once they were plopped into the sauce, but being a chopstick novice, I eventually resorted to spearing them. This only seemed to reduce them to smaller tofu globs. After pulverizing them to molecular size, I finally gave up. But I have to admit that dinner, at least what little of it I actually managed to get into my mouth, turned out to be pretty tasty.
We polished off the experience with mango-flavored ice cream for desert. Not quite finished with the absurdity of the evening, Dragon Tei chose to give out spoons to eat ice cream with. Instead, we were given what appeared to be tiny shovels. It was like eating dinner in a hardware store.
Several days later now, and the phone trouble that started this whole mess off is still around.
For the last week or so, my phone connection has been incredibly erratic. Sometimes, I'll pick it up and it'll work fine. Other times, nothing. That binary sort of "now it works and now it doesn't" is bad enough. But even worse, occasionally I'll pick up the receiver, get a snatch of dial tone, and then, as if the phone suddenly remembers that it's supposed to be giving me a hard time, it will suddenly click off into silence.
Oddly, the problem seems to come and go. It seems to get worse in periods of wind or rain, and that typically means evenings. The next morning, it will work fine again. Strange. The connection to the weather really got me thinking that it might be a problem was probably outside somewhere.
Yeah, right. How many times does the phone stop working and the problem turns out to be something outside? Never, that's how often. With most phone companies in the states, if the problem's outside the house, it's the phone company's expense to fix it; if it's inside, you're getting charged $40 an hour for a technician to come. I've had my phone conk out several times in life, and every time, it's been something as basic as the jack shorting out or something with the phone itself, not some negligence on the part of Ma Bell. So, gritting my teeth and hoping that telephone repair was one of those things that worked differently here, I called PNCC Customer Service to let them know I had a problem. (O.k., first I had find a Customer Service number that worked. That took half an hour.)
Here's the entire conversation I had with the phone company, transcribed verbatim:
Phone lady: PNCC Customer Service. Tutau. [that's "Good Morning." in Palauan]
Me: Uh, hi. I live up in Topside, and I've been having a problem with my phone for a few days. It just stops working for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Mostly when the weather's bad.
Phone lady: What's your phone number?
Me: 488-6256.
Phone lady: O.k. I'll have someone check it. {click}
Either these guys are ruthlessly efficient, or I better get a couple of tin cans and some string.
String would've been the better choice. As I said, it's now a full week after that phone call, and nothing's improved. In fact, things have gotten worse. The "off" cycles have gotten lengthier, the "taunting, then off" moments have increased, and it's become impossible to check or write e-mail as the phone can't hold the connection long enough. In desperation, I disassembled the phone, hoping to find a switch inside that was accidentally changed from "normal operation" to "produce connection that sounds like NASA crosstalk, only less reliable." But all there was inside was a small circuit board, and there was nothing on it about NASA, so I was still in the dark.
Last night, at 12:30 a.m., I wake up to the sound of the phone ringing. I'm thrilled that it's in working mode and run out to the living room.
The crackling, whooshing noise coming out of the receiver is surreal, and a little hypnotic. Suddenly, faintly through the aural haze, as if being shouted out of the bottom of a trashcan halfway down the block, I hear my father's voice. My loving parents have finally solemnized a deal with MCI for cheap overseas rates, but my first conversation with them in six weeks consists mostly of "What?" and "I can't hear you" and "My phone really sucks." Intermittently, the line goes dead momentarily, and then, apparently defibrillated back into consciousness somewhere in a back room at PNCC, beeps a little at me before letting me resume my conversation. In between the sounds of electronic chaos, beamed to the other side of the planet at the expense of my family, we manage to have a basic conversation for a few minutes. "Do you need anything?" "Are you having fun?" "What time is it there?" Finally, the clicking becomes more ominous, a sure sign that the phone company has grown tired of us saying nothing of importance and is about to take care of good-byes for us, so I reluctantly sign off, promising the connection will be better as soon as I can get the phone company in.
The next morning, I'm on the line to PNCC Customer Service again. The conversation is word-for-word identical to the one quoted above, except you can add this exchange just before the Phone Lady's last line:
Phone Lady: Is anyone home during the day?
Me: No, but if you need me, you can reach me at the Court. [488-]2607.
Now we were getting somewhere. Obviously, they'd go to the house and at least make sure the problem's not on the pole. Then, if they needed to check inside, they'd call me right? Wrong. I got home and the phone was dead again.
I'd had it. This had been going on for a week, and I was suddenly inspired. I put on my flip-flops and walked out to the big utility pole in the center of my driveway. Staring up at the profusion of wires, I realized that I had no idea what a phone wire looked like 25 feet up in the air, as distinguished from a cable t.v. cable or electrical line. But all the wires going into my house seemed to go in the same place, so at least I had someplace to start looking. Then I noticed the characteristic flat wire that is typical of a phone line, stapled to the masonry of the outside wall. I followed it one way, only to have it curve up over the roof line and disappear. Going back the other way, I found it spliced haphazardly, live ends exposed, to another wire which ran into, a-ha!, a box marked "Telephone Junction Interface."
Opening up the box and studying the contents for a while, I began to realize how things worked. I figured out that the small phone line running into a connector inside the box was a test switch and, grabbing the phone from inside, proceeded to plug it in. Bingo, dial tone. That meant the problem was someplace inside. (Told you.) Since the line inside the house was one uniterrupted wire, I tried to trace the connection as it ran from the junction box up unto the roof.
One chair and a fair amount of grunting, pulling, and hanging from the rain gutter later and I was up on the roof of my house. Suddenly, I felt very manly, as only taking a stroll out on your own roof can make you feel. Thankfully, the roof was pitched low and the corrugated tin seemed sturdy under my feet. I traced the phone line up to the point where it disappeared into the roof. Just before that was a haphazard splice, and I instantly could see what the problem was. Exposed to the elements, the already thin copper wires that carried phone service into the house had deteriorated badly. The insulation, once plastic and flexible, had hardened and cracked, and one wire seemed like it had already broken, and barely made contact with the other end. No wonder that the wind would blow and the phone would conk out.
For the first time in months, I was now in control of a problem in my life. I grabbed some tools from the house, climbed back up on the roof, and began working on stripping the cable from the exposed end, pausing briefly once in a while to watch the cars go by and enjoy the feeling that, to them, I looked like I knew what I was doing. The insulation flaked off the old wire, exposing a good inch and a half to reconnect with. Slowly, I managed to get the longer wire wrapped around the tiny stump of the exposed wire leading into the house. In the process, I discovered that the other exposed junction, where two ends of a white wire twisted together, were the electrically live ones. The shock I got tingled the tips of my finger the first time, but became less noticeable the second, third, and fourth time, as I got closer and closer to my goal and less and less interested in distractions such as my personal safety. Finally, with one last twist, I had a connection that ought to hold tight for a week or so. Jumping back down off the roof, I ran inside, picked up the phone and . . . . .
Dial tone.
This chapter uploaded on 11/17/98.
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