And now telephone lines themselves are rarely if ever even used anymore; the last ones I've seen have just dumped into a DSL modem.

We replaced the bedroom ceiling fan this summer, and discovered some "interesting" things about the rest of the wiring on the second floor. I added some notes for future me so that when I go to replace the sconces later this year, I don't have to figure out the weird wiring for them a second time.

I highly recommend doing this for your own sanity and for that of any future owners.

I also found if I identified a spam call fast enough I could hang up and switch back to the dial-up connection before it was dropped. I had to be real quick but I could usually avoid being dropped from a Starcraft match.

I have voice over IP via fiber from Sonic. The house's old interior phone wiring is no longer connected to the telco in any way. So Sonic's VOIP box is plugged into the wall jack for the old phone wiring, from which it can reach some old phones around the house.

The main problem with this is that the Sonic-branded box is too dumb to manage power failures properly. The fiber modem/router comes up fine by itself, but, on every power outage, the Sonic VOIP box has to be unplugged and reset before voice phone service comes back up. Incoming calls are silently lost. The problem seems to be that the VOIP box comes back up before the Internet link is fully operational, confusing the VOIP box.