December 21, 2005

• Cell Phone Blues

  
  

   In general,I hate technology.  As far as I’m concerned, the collective widsom of humanity was outstripped by its collective technological knowhow when someone figured out that you could use gunpowder for stuff  besides fireworks.  I would dearly love to have a few minutes alone in a quiet room, for instance, with the guy who invented the self-flushing toilet.  (He would never be the same, I can promise you that.)  Or  the moron who invented those goddamn pill bottles that you need power tools or a framing axe to get open–but he died already. Or–make that especially–cell phones.

  
  

  A fw summers ago, I reluctantly made a deal with the devil and got one of the things, mainly because I got tired of risking my life, crossing the busiest highway in the great state of Alaska, to get to to a pay phone to call home and make sure that place hadn’t burned down or blown up in my absence.  I did a bunch of research, found one–a Kyocera–that looked good and didn’t have a lot of stupid bells and whisltles.  Always the rebel, I wanted a phone that would only make phone calls.  Needless to say, the one I wanted was not available in Alaska.  The one I got wasn’t too bad, although to this day, I don’t know how to use the calculator or send text messages or play the games.

  
  

  After signing up for the service–this really long contract that somehow involved giving up some sort of legal rights to my first-born son–I got the thing, and found out that it doesn’t even work up in the valley where I live.  Seriously, our place in in some sort of major cell black hole, where you can neither send nor receive messages.  It works more or less at my business place outside of Wasilla, but it crackles and makes noises like a robot farting and sometimes cuts off completely every time a an ATV goes by, or the electric heater in my cabin kicks in, or just whenever it feels like showing me who’s boss.  Just as I once knew the location of every good pay phone in town, I faced another learning curve–not only how to work the stinking thing, but where.  Wal-mart is out, for instance–their in-store spyware blocks cell calls.  Fred Meyer is very good, however, as are most places in Wasilla.  In Willow–a mere twenty miles away–I get the “roam” message on the screen–I don’t even want to know about that.

  
  

  Eventually, I learned pretty much how to work the thing, although I have no wish to play poker with it, or use it to figure out sales tax on the calculator–it is faster and easier to figure out the percentages in my head.  And so it went.

  
  

  Recently, it developoed a new glitch–it would not let me access my voice mail.  And it would not let me access my credit card accounts or even get an authorization number for making credit card sales at my business.  So basically, the thing was useless.  So after six calls to the serviuce derpartment, and involving five different techies–who ranged from coldly arrogant to almost embarrassingly ingratiating–they finally figured out the phone didn’t work.  (DUH!)  I needed to get a new one.

  
  

  Well, great–I only used the son of a bitching thing a few times a day for like two years, and it was ready for the scrap heap.  Compare this to the real phone at my mom’s place, a black Bakelite thing that weighs about seven pounds.  It was installed the year we moved in, over forty years ago–it has never failed, never needed service.  Of course, it was made by the phone company FOR the phoe company–my mother doesn’t own it, she just rents it, and has probably paid thousands of dollars for it over the years–but it WORKS!  But I digress.  Back to the present–okay, the near past.

  
  

  I will spare us all the recounting of all the unpleasant calls to tech support–anyone owning anything more high-tech than a sundial knows about those hassles–and fast-forward to the last one.  The young woman seemed genuinely surprised when I told her that cell phone companies are now the most hated businesses in America, having nosed out credit card companies a few months back.  When she said that I didn’t have to go with their new service, that I could keep the old service, but I would have to find another out-moded phone somewhere.  I groaned, said I was a disabled senoir citizen, really wasn’t up to traipsing all over town looking for an old cell phone to buy which would be compatible with my opresent, out-dated service.  (The service I have now is digital, I forget what fancy name they gave the new one.  Maybe it’s the other way ’round. All I know is, it is supposed to work better.)  Anyway, after I bitched and moaned some more, she offered to give me a month’s free service.  Aftyer bitching and moaning some more, she upped the ante to two motnhs free service, plus she would waive the charge for the new phone itself.  Okay, fine.  Then she said it would be shipped FedEx.  I drivers groaned again.

  
  

  I explained to her that private services didn’t do well up here–they either got lost, or lost the stuff, or stole it (all of this has actually happened to us).  Well, there was no getting around that, so I gave her my geographical location and the numbers for my old cell plus the landline number.  Now the new service I went with was a little cheaper than the old one–because  it had NO long-distance and NO ulimited minutes during off-hours.  I figured what the heck–mom is getting so old and weird that she stopped answering her phone anyway, and lately, the one sister I talked to is back on heavy drugs and has been incoherant and hositle in her Xanga messages.  And when I talk to Kathy at length, mostly all that happens is that I tell her a bunch of long boring (to her) stuff that is very important to me, then she tells me a lot of long, boring (to me) stuff that is real important to her.  Given our respective memories, anything important usually goes down here, in a private message.  So I was, if not actually happy with the new situtation, at least okay with the idea of saving a few hundred bucks a year,  bucks being being even scarcer than usual these days.

  
  

  Much to my dismay, she was dismayed .  “There goes our relationship,” she moaned.  She went on to say how much she valued out nightly chats and so on.  I thought she was grossly over-reacting, but we do have different values.  That night–after discovering that my phone would not take a charge–I rather missed our chat myself.  That was a whole other exercise in frustration–I plugged thing in as usual, got nothing.  FInally, a coy little message “will not recharge” popped up and then disappeared.  I tried another outlet, same thing, and gave up.

  
  

  A day or so later, I tried again and the phone decided to take a charge.  SO at least I have a phone–for the time being–I can use–even though I still  have to go to a pay phone to check my voice messages, authorize credit card sales, or check my account balances–all the important stuff, inother words.

  • 3:31 pm
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