DEAD PHONE

This past week I had the super fun experience of dealing with the death throes of a malfunctioning phone.  On Wednesday, my perpetually cranky cordless phone really wigged out and would not allow me to exit the intercom function. I had hit the intercom button by accident, and though I had never before been involved in any way with the intercom function of my phone I was unable to leave it. The result was that no call could be completed without both the main phone and the extension being answered at the same time. And sometimes they both shut down and went to a nonexistent third line. Oh joy! Oh rapture! Oh Fardles!

Eventually I realized it was time to face-up to reality and hit the tech support option. Now, one would think there would be a tech support phone number to call when a phone is dying. After all, we are talking about communicating with a phone manufacturer. But of course, there is no phone number to call about your phone problems. No one wants to be on the other end of a phone call involving a malfunctioning, dead or dying phone.  Instead they send you to their web site, and you get to have a live chat with tech support.

Now, they may call it a live chat, but really you are having a typed correspondence with a faceless techno-bot, reaching out to you from god-knows-where. I mean it is entirely possible you are really conversing with an Indo-Greco-Etruscan technophobe through an automatic translation server which, now that I think about it, would account for the delay in response time. And too, the whole process brings back bad memories of trying to construct a file cabinet using English instructions translated by a Chinese interpreter from the original factory specs. with line drawings and not much else to go on with.

It was boring, frustrating, fruitless, and altogether a really bizarre and time-consuming experience. Words were exchanged, and ideas were mooted. Model numbers were confirmed, buttons were pushed, batteries were switched, and teeth were gnashed. But in the end, it was determined that this phone could not be saved. Euthanasia was the only answer. So, I went online to find a replacement for the recently dead phone.

What is it with the creators of new technology, all those guys that make the latest and greatest of new gadgets?  Those tech-heads must be bored out of their minds, and spend their work days dreaming up more things for your phone to do, all of which are of no interest and no use in the normal course of day-to-day living.

All I ask is that my phone: 1.)  allows me to id the caller:  2.) responds to my voicemail system; 3.) allows me to increase the volume and mute the ringer; 4.) and has a head set jack so that my hands are free while I am on the phone. That’s it. That is all I really need in the way of phone technology. I had a phone years ago that did all those things and nothing else! I loved that phone! I had it for something like ten or twelve years, and when it died, I deeply mourned its passing. It was a great phone.

Phone number two … the one that recently began to zing and spit and kvetch at me for no reason, and eventually sent me into perpetual intercom limbo … that phone is now trashed. It came with about 2500 possible combinations of functions I could explore. None of them were of any use to me, and only served to confuse its tiny little phone brain.  But, as it was also the only phone I could find with a headset jack, I made the best of it. But I am not going to miss it now that it is in phone purgatory. RIP (Really Irritating Phone)

So here I am with Phone number three. It is new and slick and looks a lot like the old fart phone that preceded it. But I will not hold that against it. After all looks can be deceiving. I spent the day getting it all set up with a new time and date stamp, a newly re-entered list of phone numbers, voice-mail recognition, and caller ID. There is really nothing else that needs to be done to get underway … except, there is a 60-page instruction manual I have not read and I have an uneasy feeling that somewhere amidst the technobabble and the overwhelming boatload of verbiage, there lurks a little glitch marked with and asterisk that will send me into intercom in perpetuity.

So, if you call and I don’t answer, you’ll know the reason. It means I am once again locked into the intercom function sliding into never-never-land.

OOPS! I gotta go, the phone is reigning… I mean ringing.

Wish me luck.