Connecting Telephone To VOIP

A Comcast Technician left me bummed out last Friday afternoon.  I will try to insert a diagram of how my network looks, beforehand thinking that I could connect my telephone without adding any additional equipment.  Though my network works fine, he said I needed an EMTA, which he described as a box with coaxial cable, Ethernet and ordinary telephone connection.  I pictured this as a supply item unless he actually meant a telephony modem or gateway.  Regardless, I am not going to swap a good cable modem merely for one that has telephone jacks.  Unless I am looking for the wrong thing, I am coming up empty.  However, I owe the technician a great debt because I ended up looking at my power source connections only to find that the case for my surge protector was broken.  Being that it was on a carpet, that thing could have caused a fire.  This was an RCA brand; so I probably bought it at Radio Shack.  So, if we consider my EMTA question number one, question number two concerns what happened when I swapped surge protectors.  After I took out the RCA strip, I plugged the corresponding devices into a spare one I had which Staples sold under the name Mighty Mike.  Unless these devices have speed requirements, something stranged happened after I powered up my computer, a Window 7 64-Bit with IE11 default.  I noticed that when I minimized program boxes, they responded like slow parachutes, as if they were leaving behind ghost images, making the system appear slow.  Then, I always had connected an external disc drive which now all of a sudden made regular, repetitive grinding sounds.  It is thin, which I believe is supposed to be mobile, with the consistency of the old Gillette razor blade case.  The unit also requires two USB connections.  The wire is Y-shaped with the plug on each end, which I connected into a powered hub.  Later I can check over these new connections and make sure the devices are solidly plugged into the replacement surge and that it is on.  The power switch also says "reset."  My other surge is also an RCA unit with the same kind of case as the one that I found broken; so for obvious reasons I did not choose to use it again.  Getting back to the EMTA, unless somebody knows otherwise, I need something more than an electrical supply like a coupler.  I guess a surge protector or a hub with coaxial and telephone connections would not necessarily connect the two lines together.  Likewise, these wall units that show them together are for decoration and no other function.  But anyway, I invite some badly needed advice since, as of January 16, my Ooma device wore out.  Because of bad technical support, I do not want another Ooma.  But I have been without telephone since that day.  Now, not only do I not have the telephone connection I counted on, but also I have a slow OS after switching to a new surge protector from one with outer damage.  However, I thought that my wired router, which I use as an access point, would allow VOIP.  From yesterday I remembered that it might be just a case of adding my network name to the router in case I didn't do it already.  Maybe the technician did not know how to do this.  I hope my image file uploads.  Thanks in advance.