Cell phone technology at its worst
I didn’t really think about how it would sound when I told the
Verizon store guy that my phone was talking to me in the middle of
the night.
But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I thought,
”
Oh no, he’s going to think I’m some sort of a crazy lady.
”
But it’s true. My phone does talk to me in the middle of the
night. It’s some sort of an ad for some application, and it’s been
going on ever since I bought a new cell phone in mid-June.
Cell phone technology at its worst
I didn’t really think about how it would sound when I told the Verizon store guy that my phone was talking to me in the middle of the night.
But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I thought, “Oh no, he’s going to think I’m some sort of a crazy lady.”
But it’s true. My phone does talk to me in the middle of the night. It’s some sort of an ad for some application, and it’s been going on ever since I bought a new cell phone in mid-June.
Cell phones are now getting too smart for their own good. And it just goes to show that you should never buy a new cell phone if your old one was working perfectly well, even though the new one is really spiffy.
At any rate, I have to give the Verizon store employee credit for not looking at me as though I were psychotic. But he was puzzled.
“Your phone comes on and talks to you?” he said. He looked over his shoulder at some of the other employees and asked them, “Have you ever heard of this happening before?”
Well, of course they hadn’t.
It wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I have the habit of leaving my cell phone on all night on the nightstand next to my bed. And that’s because I worry that my son at college might have some kind of emergency in the middle of the night and need to reach me. This was all well and good until the phone started talking to me at 5 a.m. about once a week.
Because this ad, or whatever it was, was waking me up from a sound sleep, I couldn’t remember much about it other than the fact of it happening. And that it was a woman’s voice speaking.
But of course the Verizon store guy wanted to know what the ad was about.
“I think it’s some application that’s been activated but it would help if I knew what it was for,” he said.
“I can’t remember,” is all I could venture.
In fact, it had become so annoying that I was turning my phone off at night.
“If you could listen to the message and find out what it’s for, that would help,” said the guy.
I just looked at him. Don’t think that’s gonna work, dude. I am not going to get up at 5 a.m. every day so I can figure this thing out. I’ll just stick to keeping my phone off at night, thank you very much.
Although cell phones are incredibly convenient, they can also be incredibly annoying. Also, they don’t seem to follow any kind of rhyme or reason when it comes to figuring them out.
My son (Ross, the one at college) broke his cell phone and decided to switch back to an older one of his. He went in to the Verizon store to transfer his contact information, only to be told that he needed a PIN to do that.
“PIN? What PIN?” he said. He couldn’t ever remember giving his phone a PIN, and neither could I.
So he’s having to re-enter all of his hundreds of contacts, and I am not exaggerating. This is a kid who knows a lot of people.
So I have a cell phone that talks too much, and Ross is dealing with a cell phone that communicates not at all. Instead of getting smart phones, we’ve got stupid phones.
