Friday morning, Matt Johnston poked his head in my office and says, “have you tried the phones, boss?”

 The tone of his question did not inspire confidence.

 Turns out that in prepping the unit next door to us for leasing, the demolition crew cut our phone line, and apparently removed ALL of the phone line that serves 3-4 adjacent units. 

 I had the pleasure of explaining all of this to our property manager, who in turn got to spend some quality time out here on Friday and Saturday, working with Cincinnati Bell to fix the problem. 

Alas, the demolition was so…thorough, that Cincinnati Bell needs to run a complete new cable installation. In the meantime, we have no phones. “Meantime” may be a week? Too long, in any case.

There’s a couple of lessons here.

First, call before you dig. I’m sure there are times it is tempting to just start digging, but I encourage you to use caution. Mistakes like what happened next door are so much harder to fix than they are to avoid.

Second, if you do commercial landscaping, first, do no harm. The demolition company working next door really wrecked my property manager’s day/weekend/week. If your contact is a property manager, recognize that they have plenty of things going wrong on a weekly basis. Don’t let the landscaping be one of them. Don’t be the contractor that wrecks things. 

Third, as much as I love talking to you all, please email me this week. At the moment, I don’t have a time frame for having phone service, and there’s a good chance that I’m going to end up with all our incoming calls forwarded to my cell phone. So if you get this, shoot me an email maybe. Your chances of getting in touch with me are far better if you email me!