A bunch of years ago I was dispatched to repair the phone line at a house owned by a friend of mine. My friend had been injured in 'Nam and was a paraplegic confined primarily to a wheelchair. He had bought this house and the first floor was all set up to accommodate his wheelchairs, while he rented out the second floor. His tenant also rented the basement, which he used for his hobby, building various crafts, supposedly.
The tenant had two telephone lines with extensions on both in the basement. The second line, installed after he started renting, had a lightning arrestor on the outside of the house, but the pre-existing one was in the basement along with the owner's.
I arrived having tested the line from the central office and detected what we called a "wet short circuit" on the line. There are many reasons for a wet short, which can be also be defined as a high resistance short, a typical short having very low to zero resistance. For a telephone line to operate, it has to have a circuit resistance (off hook) of less than 2400 Ohms and a conductor to conductor resistance (on hook) of greater than 300,000 Ohms, anything less than 300k is considered to be "wet".
When I arrived, the tenant was not home, so my friend let me in to the upstairs apartment. A quick check revealed that the problem was toward the street, and the line was the one with the arrestor in the basement so I asked my friend to let me in there. We discovered that the interior stairs had been closed off at the bottom, so he gave me the key to the outside door.
I was amazed when I got into the basement, where I discovered a major scale pot farm, hydroponics and all that. There was a lathe and various projects in progress too, but it was obvious what the true hobby was.
One of the pot plants had grown up into the lightning arrestor and was providing the wet short.
