OW! My New Phone Smarts!

Well, it’s happened again. I have been outwitted by technology for the 1001st time, and it smarts.

This time I moved up to a smart phone, about three years after everyone else did, largely because I felt it had been long enough for all the obvious bugs to be worked out or at least paved over.

My new phone tells me the weather with little moving cloud graphics, a moving windshield wiper graphic (for rain) and a mysterious switch to the weather in Taipei when I least expect it.

Unlike the old phone, it will not take 500 pictures of the inside of my pants pocket, but it does occasionally call people when I am just trying to check the time. “Oh. Hi. Did I call you? Sorry. New phone.”

The idea behind this effort, which will probably take three months of stumbling about in the dark to learn how it really works, was ostensibly to get more work-related things done quickly.

“Oh, you can do so much more with these smart phones,” my tech-y buddy told me. “It’s so much easier to check your emails, schedule appointments, run credit cards, everything for work!”

Uhuh.

Of course, no upgrade will go unpunished, especially if you are married. To avoid a cataclysm at home, I made sure we both upgraded our phones. That meant buying the exact same phones, same color, etc. because they were on sale at Fry’s. Imagine my horror when I accidentally took honey’s phone to work with me. My clients were calling my smart phone, tucked away in a desk drawer on silent while honey worked at the bank.

One screaming fast ride to honey’s office later, I discovered that my phone wasn’t getting text messages. None. I had foolishly trained clients to text me for an appointment when they were about to arrive at the airport, or get out of a meeting, or whatever. Text is so much easier and convenient.

The folks at AT&T somehow decided that text is no longer included in the smart phone media bundle ($15 a month) it is now “extra.” Text is now separate and costs $30 a month. They don’t tell you that when you buy the phone, and the texts I’d sent for two days had apparently gone into ether space, because when you don’t have text you don’t get a message back that says they didn’t go through. As I listened to the rep tell me I had to pay extra for text, I felt a stirring in long-dormant genetic coding for solving problems through violence. If I could just reach through the phone…I could get in trouble with the law.

Well, I’m not going to let this thing defeat me. First thing today, I’m going to go to the hotel where I used to have a day spa and get one of the parking valets to tech me how this thing works. Then I’m going to call my phone plan back and raise ruckus until I get a cheaper text plan. Later, I will turn my phone on and watch the clouds go by….