I find it amazing, with the technology boom of the last couple decades, just how intermingled and codependent seemingly disparate aspects of our lives have become.  You just never seem to think about it until something happens that makes you realize just how tangled a web it all truly is.

Take for example the little conundrum Katie and I are experiencing right now.

Last Friday and Saturday, the area where we live was hit with a ton of rain that resulted from Hurricane Rita hitting land in Texas and Louisiana.  I don't know if this was a result of these storms or not, but our home phone line went dead.  No calls in and no calls out.  I had to resort to using cellphones to get a hold of Katie.

She called SBC a few times to try to hash out the problem with them.  And we're still working at getting it all resolved almost a week later.  Should be fixed up by early next week.  We hope.

But where it gets weird is how many other things were affected.  And some that weren't.

For one, we can't get any PPV movies (not that we really do) from Comcast nor can we do much onDemand stuff.  The reason for this is because to obtain anything other than preordained programming, we need to have a working phone line that our cable box can use to connect and communicate with Comcast's servers. 

The second problem lies in our TiVo.  Ah yes, our beloved TiVo... we have fallen very quickly in love with our new toy.  Well, this, too, connects to its own as well as Comcast's servers via a phone line so it can get program information.  It can still be used during this downtime, but we have to manually set each program that we want to record just like using a VCR.  Okay, so it could be worse.  At least we can still record and we don't need to hook our old VCR back up.

But here is the really odd thing.  We have DSL service through SBC in addition to our phone service.  Basically, we hook up a DSL filter box to our wall phone jack and plug the DSL line into the side of it while the phone is still plugged in the front.  Effectively, both the phone and DSL hookups wind up going through the same phone jack that isn't working.

However, our DSL connection works perfectly fine.  In fact, it works better than it usually does.  I just don't get it.  Why would one thing plugged in to our phone jack work and everything else be kaput?

Before you say it's a matter of voice versus data transfer, bear in mind that our TiVo and PPV/inDemand are also data transfers and they don't work, but DSL is.

I'm baffled.