Phone Information
Aug. 26th, 2004 03:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaThere is a very good chance that as of today, 26 August 2004, my cellphone number is going to change.
I'm getting up early today--at 10:00am--so I have plenty of time to deal with this latest cellphone disaster (see below for details), as it is extremely likely that as of 11:00am or so I will no longer be a Verizon Wireless customer. I have been doing research on Sprint PCS programs and T-Mobile programs, as well, as some of them seem decent...but I will know more once I talk with local representatives who can tell me more about reception quality and answer other similar questions that their respective websites do not address to my satisfaction.
There is still a chance that I may work things out with Verizon, but they'd better goddamn well be ready to suck the shit from my ass with a golden straw while flying in Brittany Murphy to fellate me at the same time...because it's going to take extraordinary measures for them to keep my business. Extraordinary. Measures.
Needless to say, if I change cellular providers, I will inform everyone of my new number ASAP. As far as your phone numbers go...I have a small number of them backed up in my Outlook Contacts list, but most were kept exclusively on my phone and are now gone.
Anyway...
You will no doubt recall that just a few months ago I got a new cellphone from Verizon because my previous one, a rather cheap model, has been giving me a lot of problems. You may not recall, however, that before that previous phone I'd had another one (a Motorola Star-Tac, incidentally, which I thought was one of the best phones on the market) which gave me so much trouble I eventually flung it out the window of my car while tooling down Route 51 and 65mph. Despite the fact that I'd gotten two shitty phones from the Verizon store before, when I bitched the last time I was up there they cut me a great deal on my new phone and really treated me well, considering that I lashed them good about having sold me two shitty phones. I was ready to drop Verizon then, but I figured I'd stick with them since they did cut me a sweet deal and prettymuch promised me that the new phone wouldn't give me any trouble.
And it didn't. Until tonight. The trouble it caused me tonight, however, made me fling it straight into a brick wall and then grind the fragments into smaller fragments beneath a big piece of broken concrete.
Simply put, when I got home from work--already edgy as hell and aggravated from all the mind-blowingly sickening news stories I'd read there (plus the fact that I had to do 98% of all the work in the entire office tonight, and that always pisses me off)--I discovered that my phone was off. It's NEVER off. It was running a little low on power, sure, but not that low....Anyway, I went to look for my power cord for it so I could feed it some juice and call my girlfriend.
The anger started building when I couldn't find my power cable. Couldn't find it anywhere...even though I'd charged my phone up Sunday night. This would've only been a pety annoyance, because I keep, like, five backup universal chargers around the house for charging my laptop or phone or screwdriver or whatever (blessed be the world of multi-adaptors!). But guess what? I couldn't find one of the motherfuckers. I've no clue where ANY of them are.
Well...I figured then that I'd have to get up to the Verizon store and buy another power adapter ($75 right there) the next morning--but I was allright in the meantime if I could get my phone to turn on so I could get Vanessa's number off it. So I turned it on. Or...tried to.
It wouldn't turn on at ALL at first. Bad sign. Even when my phone has shut itself off because of 0.00001% battery power, it still maintains enough residual charge to turn on for a second or two--usually long enough to grab a number and run. But even if it didn't, if it turned on, at least I'd know that there wasn't something wrong with it and I'd just get it a new charger cable and that would be that. Aggravating, but not fatal.
Well, third time's the charm--it turned on. And when I went to scroll through my phonebook...it was empty.
All my numbers were gone.
I turned it off and on once more. Numbers. Were. All. Gone. I know enough about cellphone memories to know that much like computer BIOSes, the little memory banks that store the phone's software and data (i.e., phonebooks and added software, etc.) are powered by their own little battery that will continue to operate even in the absence of an actual phone battery which would run the transmitter and whatnot. So...in other words, my phone might not have had enough juice in its standard battery to turn on for more than a second or two at a time, but I still should've seen VERIZON appear on the opening screen and still should've seen my phonebook, if only for a flicker.
The goddamned phone lost all my numbers. Whatever happened to it was not just a depleted battery.
Sure...I could've waited to take it in to the store the next morning to see what was wrong with it--but you know what? I was already steaming, ready to boil over, and then I thought about just what was going to happen at the Verizon store tomorrow: they'd look at my phone, tell me it needed to be replaced, offer me a new phone of the same type to come in the mail in two to five days, and then feed me another line of bullshit.
Instead, I smashed the fucking thing into oblivion.
Not a very in-control of grown-up thing to do...but consider: this is the third phone I'd purchased from them that had some kind of serious hardware problem. Once...yeah, anything can be bad once--my first laptop was bad, after all, but the second one that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eolh now owns and my new one are both fine, after all. OK...maybe twice: the second phone I bought from them was pretty cheap, after all, and you can't expect too much sturdiness from a $70 phone. But thrice? THREE TIMES? I think I would be insane to buy another fucking phone from them after having three turn out bad in one way or another.
I'm going to give them a last chance, however. If they offer me a really expensive phone with a LOT of gewgaws for next to nothing just to keep my business, I may go with it--for one reason: their service, of late, has been really good. That is, their network connectivity has been good: I've had very few spontaneously dropped calls, and reception even here in the Styx is better than ever. I don't want to trade good quality of service for something questionable at times like Spring and T-Mobile...but on the other hand, do I really want to risk a FOURTH bad phone? I'm convinced now that I can't get a decent piece of hardware from those people, so I'm definitely checking out other routes first. If Sprint turns out to offer a much better deal and offers a better service plan (including good reception) and/or warranty and/or knowledge base for the phones used by their network, I am dropping Verizon like a radioactive turd.
Christ. I do not need this annoyance right now...five days before the fucking semester starts.
One of my first acts as a god will probably be to hunt down the descendants of Verizon corporate and technical bigwigs and devour them slowly with wave after wave of really pissed-off nanobots.
I'm getting up early today--at 10:00am--so I have plenty of time to deal with this latest cellphone disaster (see below for details), as it is extremely likely that as of 11:00am or so I will no longer be a Verizon Wireless customer. I have been doing research on Sprint PCS programs and T-Mobile programs, as well, as some of them seem decent...but I will know more once I talk with local representatives who can tell me more about reception quality and answer other similar questions that their respective websites do not address to my satisfaction.
There is still a chance that I may work things out with Verizon, but they'd better goddamn well be ready to suck the shit from my ass with a golden straw while flying in Brittany Murphy to fellate me at the same time...because it's going to take extraordinary measures for them to keep my business. Extraordinary. Measures.
Needless to say, if I change cellular providers, I will inform everyone of my new number ASAP. As far as your phone numbers go...I have a small number of them backed up in my Outlook Contacts list, but most were kept exclusively on my phone and are now gone.
Anyway...
You will no doubt recall that just a few months ago I got a new cellphone from Verizon because my previous one, a rather cheap model, has been giving me a lot of problems. You may not recall, however, that before that previous phone I'd had another one (a Motorola Star-Tac, incidentally, which I thought was one of the best phones on the market) which gave me so much trouble I eventually flung it out the window of my car while tooling down Route 51 and 65mph. Despite the fact that I'd gotten two shitty phones from the Verizon store before, when I bitched the last time I was up there they cut me a great deal on my new phone and really treated me well, considering that I lashed them good about having sold me two shitty phones. I was ready to drop Verizon then, but I figured I'd stick with them since they did cut me a sweet deal and prettymuch promised me that the new phone wouldn't give me any trouble.
And it didn't. Until tonight. The trouble it caused me tonight, however, made me fling it straight into a brick wall and then grind the fragments into smaller fragments beneath a big piece of broken concrete.
Simply put, when I got home from work--already edgy as hell and aggravated from all the mind-blowingly sickening news stories I'd read there (plus the fact that I had to do 98% of all the work in the entire office tonight, and that always pisses me off)--I discovered that my phone was off. It's NEVER off. It was running a little low on power, sure, but not that low....Anyway, I went to look for my power cord for it so I could feed it some juice and call my girlfriend.
The anger started building when I couldn't find my power cable. Couldn't find it anywhere...even though I'd charged my phone up Sunday night. This would've only been a pety annoyance, because I keep, like, five backup universal chargers around the house for charging my laptop or phone or screwdriver or whatever (blessed be the world of multi-adaptors!). But guess what? I couldn't find one of the motherfuckers. I've no clue where ANY of them are.
Well...I figured then that I'd have to get up to the Verizon store and buy another power adapter ($75 right there) the next morning--but I was allright in the meantime if I could get my phone to turn on so I could get Vanessa's number off it. So I turned it on. Or...tried to.
It wouldn't turn on at ALL at first. Bad sign. Even when my phone has shut itself off because of 0.00001% battery power, it still maintains enough residual charge to turn on for a second or two--usually long enough to grab a number and run. But even if it didn't, if it turned on, at least I'd know that there wasn't something wrong with it and I'd just get it a new charger cable and that would be that. Aggravating, but not fatal.
Well, third time's the charm--it turned on. And when I went to scroll through my phonebook...it was empty.
All my numbers were gone.
I turned it off and on once more. Numbers. Were. All. Gone. I know enough about cellphone memories to know that much like computer BIOSes, the little memory banks that store the phone's software and data (i.e., phonebooks and added software, etc.) are powered by their own little battery that will continue to operate even in the absence of an actual phone battery which would run the transmitter and whatnot. So...in other words, my phone might not have had enough juice in its standard battery to turn on for more than a second or two at a time, but I still should've seen VERIZON appear on the opening screen and still should've seen my phonebook, if only for a flicker.
The goddamned phone lost all my numbers. Whatever happened to it was not just a depleted battery.
Sure...I could've waited to take it in to the store the next morning to see what was wrong with it--but you know what? I was already steaming, ready to boil over, and then I thought about just what was going to happen at the Verizon store tomorrow: they'd look at my phone, tell me it needed to be replaced, offer me a new phone of the same type to come in the mail in two to five days, and then feed me another line of bullshit.
Instead, I smashed the fucking thing into oblivion.
Not a very in-control of grown-up thing to do...but consider: this is the third phone I'd purchased from them that had some kind of serious hardware problem. Once...yeah, anything can be bad once--my first laptop was bad, after all, but the second one that
eolh now owns and my new one are both fine, after all. OK...maybe twice: the second phone I bought from them was pretty cheap, after all, and you can't expect too much sturdiness from a $70 phone. But thrice? THREE TIMES? I think I would be insane to buy another fucking phone from them after having three turn out bad in one way or another.I'm going to give them a last chance, however. If they offer me a really expensive phone with a LOT of gewgaws for next to nothing just to keep my business, I may go with it--for one reason: their service, of late, has been really good. That is, their network connectivity has been good: I've had very few spontaneously dropped calls, and reception even here in the Styx is better than ever. I don't want to trade good quality of service for something questionable at times like Spring and T-Mobile...but on the other hand, do I really want to risk a FOURTH bad phone? I'm convinced now that I can't get a decent piece of hardware from those people, so I'm definitely checking out other routes first. If Sprint turns out to offer a much better deal and offers a better service plan (including good reception) and/or warranty and/or knowledge base for the phones used by their network, I am dropping Verizon like a radioactive turd.
Christ. I do not need this annoyance right now...five days before the fucking semester starts.
One of my first acts as a god will probably be to hunt down the descendants of Verizon corporate and technical bigwigs and devour them slowly with wave after wave of really pissed-off nanobots.
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