Monday, February 13, 2012

Don't call me, I'll call you...

Back at the ranch, technological challenges abound. My old cellphone was clearly reaching the end of her days, having served me well for several years beyond the expected lifetime, and since Handsome Son had upgraded his to something quite posh, he offered me his old one which was still considerably more posh than my little old pioneering steam driven one. You're supposed to be able to transfer your number and the minutes you already bought to another phone. In principle.

We will draw a veil over the cellphone site's inability to build a website that works, and the hours of time and cs calls HS, himself a computer whiz, and patience personified, had to make.



And now we have the situation where the old phone is disabled, able only to make emergency calls, which is fine, because I plan to donate it for that purpose. The new to me phone now has my minutes and number on it. So far so good, only took several hours of clicking and banging. But it refuses to activate. The account tells me it's active. The site says it's active. But the phone refuses to do anything. Lights on, no-one's home. Funny, I thought the government had a lock on handling people this way...the hard part for HS is that he knows websites and building them, and he can analyze just why this one isn't working very well, adding to the annoyance of feeding it the same information over and over getting only a tiny bit ahead each time..

So here I sit, without any form of phone other than the lovely new one of HS's which he lent me, since it's my only link. Dangit. He will try once again, at his home where there's a landline, to get cs and see if they can undo whatever's not working at their end.

I can only hope that I will one day have a phone that works. One fortunate thing was that I thought of copying all my saved numbers onto a card, which won't crash, a 3x5 card, that is, because they vanished shortly after I did it...of course I can't actually call anyone. Anyway, this is to make sure anyone who might otherwise be calling me be aware that they need to email instead!

Poor me, reduced to the bare necessities of life, a working computer with connections, and a borrowed top of the line cellphone, it's hard.

Several of my friends have had dramatic computer crashes in the last couple of weeks, and at the bank today, their printer quit in the middle of trying to produce a certified check for me, but after the teller had belted it a couple of times and unplugged and replugged, it grudgingly gave me my check. I wonder if Mercury is in retrograde.

3 comments:

  1. Hope that you get everything working soon. Being connected is quite important though in this digital age it sure can be a hassle.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Danged technology. More trouble than it's worth.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yikes - have to say though that the old method of thumping it and then unplugging and replugging seems to work. Of course if you thump it TOO hard there's always the danger of having to physically reconstruct it.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks so much for commenting. I really appreciate your taking the time, and taking part. Please read the comments and see if your question is already answered!