24 July 2010 There’s an icon there? Really?

24 July 2010 There’s an icon there? Really?


The new phones powered up nicely, showed at least minimum level bars, and refused to activate. A call to Verizon customer service was equally ineffective. At 1600 on Friday afternoon I left for Greeneville and the nearest Verizon store. While waiting to be helped I managed to activate one phone. The CSR looked at both and assured me that they were both activated. I made it home slightly after 1700 with two phones needing to be recharged.

Several attempted calls, made standing at a window with a phone showing service were eventually dropped. En route to retrieve the morning’s paper, I watched my phone drift in and out of service while walking the ca. 75 meters to the mail box. I tried twice to establish voice mail and finally drove two miles to make contact. I wound up activating my phone once more before I could create a voice mail message.

Currently I’m waiting on three txt messages from various sources to be recovered and downloaded into my phone. Two of them are to allow me to complete downloads of free ring tones. One, perhaps two more, should have been delivered from Verizon at initial power-up. Instead, I now have to wait on U.S. Mail to deliver two number strings that will allow me to complete registration with Verizon.

Gloria and I have decided that we’ll try the home cellular boost unit Verizon offers. It’s frustrating to be paying for the technology and to not be able to use it. Of course, if we want to drive several miles each day just to retrieve possible messages and find out what calls we missed, we’re in a perfect location to do that.

In the interim, I’m setting up my phone as much as possible, as I want it to be. I don’t need the throw-away games packed into it. I will need larger capacity micro-SD cards. I found the icon glossary finally. Unfortunately, most of the icons are nearly microscopic in size. I’ve spent so much effort trying to see what might be appearing on a small screen that I feel almost like I’m back at a lab bench, looking for diagnostic markers for amoeba. I suspect that I will never see most of these icons in actual use.

I spent an hour or so last night copying contact information from the old phone to the new. This morning I discovered that I had input our land line number incorrectly. It’s easy to miss a key on a slide out keyboard the size of half a deck of playing cards. I don’t see myself engaging in much texting. Of course, since we pay for each message, there is strong incentive not to use text messaging at all.

Today’s dinner will be chicken prepared tandoori style over charcoal, saffron rice, cucumber raita, cilantro & Major Gray’s chutneys.



Again, Shabbat Shalom!