The Deathstar

The Hubs packed me off to the doctor today, sure that I had West Nile Virus because of the MosquitoLand next door and my flu like symptoms since Wednesday. Yosemite news articles probably fueled the fire, so I agreed to get it checked out. My regular doctor was out and I met an old guy filling in. He was very patient with me as I explained my symptoms and threw in a few things for good measure, like bad hearing, and dimmer eyes, and just why is it I can't lose weight even though I still eat like a teenager and don't exercise?

I got the thumbs up that I didn't have WNV but I did have a virus. A catchable virus. So much for the big get together with the grandkinds tomorrow. It's fluids and rest for me, and maybe a treadmill and ear and eye tests in the coming months. 

Speaking of wasting time, I finally acknowledged my Samsung slide phone from the dark ages had lived a good life. You remember the phones with just a camera, no internet, no computer stuff like emails and links to Facebook. Just a phone. Well, sadly, the audio portion went out and really, what good is a phone without the audio portion?

The phone store is a terrifying place. It's got all these tecchie people who talk really fast and their fingers whiz over thekeyboard and slide screens and colors jump around. Malcolm was one such salesman. He did find me a good unlimited calling plan which I need now that we have no home phone, and unlimited texting which is good because I guess everybody texts like 2 or 3 words at a time instead of full sentences, and so one conversation via text can take 30 exchanges. Who can afford that on the 250 texts a month plan? You'd only get to talk to 5 people all the way through.

Malcolm recommended I get an Android. Okay, it seemed cool the way he described it, and he was gushing with enthusiasm, and who wouldn't like voice activation emails and GPS and this is how you turn it on and this and this and this this this, and have a good day. I called the Hubs and was thinking it was pretty good except for not knowing how to end the call. So I just turned the phone off.

I turned it back on. The green pick up icon appeared on the screen. It was ringing.  I pushed the screen and the green pick up receiver icon and nothing happened. I pushed it again. Third ring by this time, as I hunted around the outside of the case frantically and pushed one of those buttons which was volume control. Now it was screaming a fourth and fifth ring, so I just turned off the phone.

The Hubs got home and he was laughing at me ~! ~ so smarty pants, I had him try, and do you know what? He couldn't answer the phone either. That was day 1 with the Android Stratosphere. By the end of day 2, I had put everything back in the box and stuffed in the receipt and it is in my car. Any phone that requires a user's manual before answering the first call is too much phone for me.

We decided to skip a home phone because ATandT is extremely stubborn. When we called for service, the rep insisted that we really live in Woodland. No, actually, there are 2 County Road 95's in Yolo, one in Woodland and one in Zamora, and we live in Zamora.  He wouldn't budge: their files clearly said Woodland, and you can't argue the point, even though one would hope an employee would at some point trust that we know where we live.

We needed them out to help with a phone line that swooped through a bunch of trees, wrapped around a pole and hung dangerously low over the gravel drive before attaching to the side of the house. It looked like a cloth wire covering, from the 1920s.  The phone line also ran across the roof and then swooped low across the lawn to the neighbor's house, if you can believe that.

I called the Deathstar to dispatch a fellow, and they sent him to the wrong town, because they are absolutely sure we live in Woodland. He never did arrive. He reported there was actually no street address in Woodland, which was no surprise to us because we don't live there, closed the ticket and went home.

I called again. The second tech eventually did arrive after 3 directional adjustment calls and, after a brief assessment he just cut the line between the houses that ran across the lawn. (I think he was crabby from all that driving around.)

This is painful to admit, for me too, but that hanging phone line was still a problem over the drive, and we still needed it fixed. A third call, and a third guy out (after a brief tour of CR95, Woodland), who knotted a bunch of cable at the top of the pole raising it up about 8', and left.

Finally we were ready to turn on our phone! The Deathstar charged us something crazy like $150 to flip a switch to activate the line. Only, you guessed it, they activated a home somewhere in Woodland. Ours never did work. The Hubs called and they vehemently insisted it was active. Not in Zamora, it's not. We fought it all the way up the chain of command before they finally zeroed out the bill. I'm pretty sure that was the day we abandoned the whole land-line idea.

The end of the tale comes last week when a PG and E guy was onsite, and looked at the tangled mess of phone line that was jammed up in the trees and he just cut it right from the pole for us.  So I will be needing a cell phone with unlimited voice and texting for life. We have officially severed our connection.