Yep, I really did.  I’m fine though, and how I did it was pretty funny actually.

My mom came upstairs and woke me up to tell me the Internet was not working.  I thought this was just a case of the router freezing up or something so I went into my back room to reset the router.  I noticed however that the DSL and Activity lights were not on/flashing on the DSL modem.

I restarted the modem figuring it had just froze up, although it had never done that before.  It still would not connect.

I assumed that either my dad either didn’t pay the Internet bill or the ISP was just down right now.  I asked my mom if he paid it, and she said yes.  Thus I just figured the ISP was having issues or doing something right now.

After a while, maybe 5-10 minutes, I had a thought.  One of our dogs, Bailee, was chewing around the top of the steps last night.  I thought she was just chewing the floor board.  I went and looked and sure enough, she had chewed through the phone cable that runs along that step.  There was the issue.

Okay, so here I was.  My dad was at work, who would normally fix this type of thing.  I didn’t want to wait 6 hours for him to get home so I started to work on it myself.

I knew if I could strip the wires and reconnect them and tape them back together I could get Internet again.  Unfortunately I could not locate my dad’s good pair of wire strippers.

I used my pocket knife to get the outer cover off each end of the wire, but obviously the two wires inside the phone cable were too small to use my knife.  I decided, I would use my teeth.

I first did the side that goes to the modem.  I got both of the covers off the wires showing the copper inside.  I then started on the other one (that goes to the wall downstairs.  I put the wires in my mouth and OUCH!

I pulled the wires back out of my mouth then thought I had just poked myself with the bit of copper that was showing, I started to put it back inside my mouth but realized, that hurt way too much to be just a poke then I remembered, this thing has current running through it.

Basically I electrocuted my tongue a little.  It still hurts a little right now, about an hour after the fact.

After that I went down and disconnected the other end of the wire from the wall and went back upstairs and continued what I was doing with the wire; stripping it with my teeth.

I have it rigged right now and working, but we had no electrical tape so I used shipping tape to just tape the wires to the wood floor.  Its rigged so it will work fine right now until my dad gets home and does it properly.

I guess I’m just lucky phone wire just has a couple volts running through it.