ET, Phone Home

Today I expect to receive my replacement phone. Replacement because two days ago my phone (bought 8/21/08) turned on and got stuck on the verizon logo. It flashed it actually, as if taunting my every attempt to reset and restart. I am not super abusive to my phones... ok this is sort of a lie. I once threw a phone off the roof I was standing on to the lower roof about 14 feet below in an arching dramatic toss of aggravation but this was after it malfunctioned in the middle of an irate call to a missing contractor. I am abusive but have good intentions and treat phones relatively nicely until they start to malfunction. This is when the throwing kicks in.
This makes the first LG chocolate 3 I have replaced but brought to mind my other cellular devices and the way in which they were replaced....

LG Chocolate Version 1.0:

I have owned three of these bad boys, one getting stuck in the open position...because there is nothing better than buying a phone for its small stylish design and then carrying a double sized bulge in your pocket. "Is that a banana in your....." You get the idea.


One got caught spinning randomly when the wheel was touched or not touched thru any number of screens, options, numbers, messages, pictures.. you name it, it scrolled... Made it awful hard to text or call or answer or well, in general use the phone at all.

And then there was the last straw. The one that pushed me to the Chocolate 3.
I had a demon phone that called people. It called people when it was shut. It called people upon opening it. When you tried to answer an incoming call, it became normal for people to wait up to 15 seconds to listen for answer because I would be maniacally hitting clear in order to stop the new call that was happening over the incoming call. I learned quickly that hitting end hung up both calls. It took over calling people about a month or so before I could update my phone for "free". About one week before the update, it also learned how to text. I owned "The Turk" of cellphones and gave it all away for functionality. Plus, I was worried about Sarah Connor coming after me to destroy it before it could become Skynet....

I don't remember much about the specific name of the phone before the Chocolate Escapades but I do remember it almost breaking in half, causing me to believe a slider phone was much more resilient. This was from overuse, claimed the insurance people. (This was a replacement I received only a month prior.) I dropped one of these in a parking lot. I left one on a train I was riding from Philadelphia to NYC that was headed on to Boston. I lost one in a bar one night. (i love the insurance program Verizon puts out. I always max out. Always.)

At the same time, I had a durable Nextel for work. At a fitness expo we were working to give Keystone Rugby a little greater Philadelphia exposure, I accidentally snapped my phone into its holster a little too strongly. It skittered across the parking lot and slide under a car, falling into the only storm water sewer basin in the entire parking lot. One hour later, a soaked KM, a non-wet RH (who had gone for help or supplies but had found kittens if I remember correctly and sort of forgot to come back for a while) and myself had rescued the phone mostly thru KM's genius, a coat hanger, some string, a pair of plyers and a couple of sticks. It never turned back on and I was told I should have just reported it stolen. The sim card was bad too.

Ah, the memories of phones gone past....

A tid bit nippley

Another good friend, JN aka B, shared this little gem yesterday about her recent email escapades:

"So I’ve been tanning for my friend’s wedding on Saturday. I went topless b/c I don’t want the lines. So I said to my friend that I didn’t want to burn my.... Nips... :) so she told me her fiancé said to put chapstick on them. Which to me- makes perfect sense. So I have been. Then last night, I forgot. OOPS! Well... They hurt a little. So I go to email my friend and her fiancé – who I’ve never emailed, but know he works for the state – as does she. So I take her email address: and put in his initials: .ONLY to get an email saying ‘Brian’s email is There are a lot of Bells that work for the State – you’ve now told some weirdo that you burnt your nips... B/c you forgot chapstick."

Your day could always start out like this, people...and bbell, if you are out there, we hope you at least got a smile at 7AM yesterday morning!

Crashing down around me...

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." -Robert X Cringely

I really like this quote because it represents a common issue: the desire of the computer to blow up. I am not saying I am alone in this, just that I have been subjected to it often.

I will be the first to admit that computers don't make a whole lot of sense to me. My dad's computer, if you sign in as him, won't let him view anything with flash or embedded files but sign-in under guest and it works just fine. (??!!??)

But it seems odd that something we pay what would be 198 hours at minimum wage to purchase (aka a whole month's work) is allowed to blow up every few years and we don't throw a conniption about it.

For example, my friend KM to whom the laptop comprises one of her top five most cherished possessions is experiencing the implosion of yet another plastic box of microchips. This is at least her second to go since graduating college. Is she mad? Yes. But does she have any recourse? Not really. Computers aren't expected to live that long....

Take my computer experiences. In college, the server at school crashed, corrupting my ipod on which I was storing my thesis as I had stopped trusting computers and refused to save all of my thesis on any computer due to their propensity to crashing. The previous year I had spent many hours at the forensic lab, trying to coerce the tech team to extract the last four years of my life off the now oversized coaster formerly known as my ibook. The tech team told me I was lucky to have gotten four years out of it.

But even my distrust worked against me, as I found myself piecing my thesis together from various files on three different computer hard drives and back-up cds. I have still not finished my thesis book (I also had a broken hand at the time which is a whole separate post) and still have various pieces of thesis floating about my house in the form of zip disks (obsolete), cd's (scratchable), flash drives (very easy to lose) and a monster hard drive (most likely under-utilized because it kind of intimidates me).

My work computer, a hand me down from my boss because my old one was literally older than the amount of time I have been out of college, has suffered from a new hard drive, had two keys replaced, and about once every two months choosing to show me the blue screen of death followed by the black screen of non-commitance. "Maybe I'll turn back on, maybe I won't", the black screen taunts. "Maybe all your files will be gone or maybe I will work fine again for two more months."

This is an upgrade from the previous who was missing three keys, had had its hard drive replaced twice (once after a week of vacation where I didn't use it because I wasn't even there yet I was blamed for its demise), and who wouldn't allow you to use two office applications at the same time without requiring a restart to save what you had done. *General Note: restarts don't actually save the work you have done. You only luck out if it does that back-up save thing. It only took me twice to catch on to this little quirk...*

And now, with two keys missing (do we see a theme?), my personal laptop which I love, is starting to go. I have replaced the hard drive once. I have reformatted. I have even stopped asking it to edit photoshop files and have admitted that using imovie for a little seven minute movie will take days. I only pray that work and home don't go at the same time....I think I am addicted.