After having unwittingly committing my cellphone to the not-so-briney deep of Rice Lake on the weekend of September 11-12, I have been without a phone all this long while.
It's killing me. KILLING. ME. I miss you, Motorola V360!
"Oh, I'll just ring the Captain to let him know we're running an errand before returning home....Oh, right. I don't have a phone."
*gnash gnash*
Recently, I told the captain, who was paralyzed with cell-phone-buying indecision*, "Just. Buy. Me. A. Frickin'. Phone. Already."
We hemmed and hawwed over the merits of buying a cheapie cheap basic bare-bones pay-as-you-go phone (essentially what I had before it went for a swim), or upgrading to a more feature-rich $mart phone. ← Dollar sign deliberate.
Do we switch carriers? Do we buy a cheap phone at Petro Canada and swap the SIM card from that phone into a second-hand or unlocked $mart phone to get a cheap data plan? Agonize, scheme, agonize, waffle, waffle.
I've really been pressed for time with the whirlwind schedule of fall activities. They have me out of the house for numerous hours on end; away from my calendar, my laptop, and my Brain. I wanted at least a decent PDA that would help me track my schedule. I didn't care about having an on-phone camera or MP3 player (I already have those, and they're better quality that what a phone would afford). I hoped to have web access, but it wasn't an imperative.
The Captain narrowed the options down to a few Nokia phones with full keyboards (yay!). Blackberry-like phones, without the Blackberry brand. They were going to cost close to $200, but if we kept them on the pay-as-you-go plan of my old phone, I could
buy 20 megs of extra data access (for web features) for a 24-h period for $2 when and if I needed it.
Strangely, Rogers differentiates between Cellphones and $mart phones in their data plans, and charges $mart phones more (cellphones only have to pay $1 a day for unlimited access). Of course, this dollar discrepancy sent the Captain of Cheap into a tail spin and he
had to know what the criteria were for identifying a $mart phone vs. a cellphone. *sigh* Rogers never did deliver a satisfactory answer to him. One cheeky tart at the help desk actually said "I should think that's obvious." Ooo, boy was I tempted to switch to another carrier right then and there.
Eventually the captain asked me to look at the Nokia E71:
"It's pretty," I said, "buy it."
He clapped his hand to his forehead.
"But you haven't even held it! You don't know what features it has! You can't buy a phone because it's 'pretty'."
"Yes I can," I responded. "I don't need to see it or hold it. Just buy me a frickin' phone. Whatever you get me will be fine."
Shortly thereafter I hopped on Kijiji (♥♥♥) to see if there were any E71 phones for sale, and there were! One was listed at $100, already on the Rogers' network.
Nokia E71 made in Fineland made of all medal the advertisement said.
I cringed.
"There's one for sale in Bowmanville, and I think they're not very bright." I told the captain.
He contacted them and arranged to drive over the next night to take a look at the phone. Then he cyber-stalked them to see what kind of people they are. It's scary how much information you can learn about people with a straight forward Google search. Luckily, they seemed harmless (if in dire need of a dictionary/spell checker and some better privacy settings on their Facebook profiles) and he went to Bowmanville the very next night.
He came home with a spiffy new-to-me-phone! All that it was missing was a SIM card so that it would work on Rogers' network. We were sticking with Rogers because I still had $50 of air time paid for on my old pay-as-you-go phone and we were hoping to be able to transfer the $ and not lose it forever. It's a good thing we're honest folk (if creepy cyber stalkers), because the former owner left the phone full with their old contact lists, 15-min audio recordings of their daughter screaming at a Jonas Brothers concert, you name it. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.
The following evening the captain returned home with a new SIM card that cost exactly $0 (for once Rogers did something right! Normally they charge $10 for these.) However, we still needed to call Rogers and ask them to activate the card. After getting bounced around Rogers' automated attendant system (grr), we ended up talking with someone in their home phone department.
Uh, no.
Tried again. Got someone in the mobile department (yay!) but they didn't handle Pay-as-you-go accounts (boo!), and the Pay-as-you-go department was only open 9-5 (boo! part II). We encouraged the Mobile guy to at least activate the SIM and said we'd deal with the Pay-as-you-go team the next day. With the SIM plugged into the phone and working, I checked my phone balance, and lo - the $50 was still there! So we didn't even need to contact the PAYG people. (yay!)
Very long story short: I've got me a new phone. [insert Snoopy happy dance]
If you haven't already done so, please send me your contact info so I can plug it into my contact list. I lost all my data when the other phone sank like a stone.
Thanks for reading this tenuously cottage-related blog post.
* Why was it up to the captain to decide which phone to buy? Because he's CHEAP; no matter which phone I had settled on, he would find a better deal, better features, better EVERYTHING and would bemoan my inferior phone purchasing skills for weeks. Ergo: he decides, because I don't want to listen to it. I'm more than happy to ignorantly chuck money at the problem and have a cellphone the very next day. Him, not so much.
