After Sheri spent 15 hours last night holding a telephone handset to her ear we thought it would be a good idea to invest in a good telephone headset. I had done just a little bit of preliminary research and it seemed a good one, not the best, but a good one, would be in the $80 to $130 range.

Then we had the thought that maybe she could just bring her headset from work home on the weekends she is on call, or maybe they had an extra one lying around. So when we left the house this afternoon our intention was just to go to a few places and price them out and read the packaging.

The first place we stopped, Office Depot, had the GN Netcom 5140, normally $80, on sale for $60. GN Netcom and Plantronics were the two brands I saw most often during my research so I felt comfortable with the brand. For that price we just went ahead and bought it.

When I got home and set it up I could hear the other person but they could not hear me. Also it wasn't working the way the instructions said it should. When I hung up the phone the call was supposed to terminate. It didn't and I still heard the call through the headset. I also could not dial when in headset mode. I had to switch to handset mode, dial, and then switch back to headset mode.

I tried another phone and it behaved the exact same way. I thought a faulty microphone could of course be way the other person could not hear me, but I couldn't see how that could be responsible for the other problem with the hanging up and the dialing stuff, and I couldn't believe that an $80 headset could have two major things wrong with it. I decided to take it back and exchange it. When I brought it back home I behaved exactly the same as the other one. Crap. The chances of two units have the exact same defect seemed to be about zero, so the problem had to be me. I have set up several telephone headsets before, and I checked and rechecked how I had everything connected, but it just wasn't working.

I tried calling their customer service line but it is closed on the weekends. I decided to just put it out of my mind and give them a call on Monday. Something was just not right, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

About an hour or so later a thought slammed into my head: both of the phones I tried were the Slimline style where most of the guts of the phone are in the handset. That put the hook downstream of the amplifier. With a conventional phone the hook would be upstream of the amplifier.

Did we even have a non-Slimline style phone in the house? I couldn't remember. I guess I would go to Radio Shack tomorrow and find the cheapest conventional style phone. Then I remembered a packing box that I have not touched since we moved here five years ago. I wasn't sure, but I really seemed to remember a phone in that box.

I dug out the box and sure enough there was a phone. I plugged everything in and it worked like a champ! Then I felt bad that I returned a perfectly good headset.

I am glad we picked one up today and that I persevered to get it working because Sheri has been on the phone again for almost an hour, and it looks like she will be on for at least another two hours.