The New Cellphone

I’m now good to go…

A few years back I jumped into a friend’s swimming pool on a hot summer day and it was a delightful experience right up until I realized I still had my cellphone in my bathing suit pocket.

Anytime you play Jacques Cousteau with a cellphone in your pocket I gotta think the blame’s on you and you can’t blame the cellphone company if their product doesn’t take a licking and keep on ticking. (OK, two paragraphs in and every cultural reference is from the last century so I’ll see what I can do about that, but don’t get your hopes up.)

Since I was on vacation at the time of the swimming pool incident, I called my cellphone company – Consumer Cellular, whose ads seem to indicate their target demographic is Civil War veterans – and had them ship me a new phone and the whole thing was a pain in the ass because my SIM card got wet and SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Module because it’s the memory chip that stores all the information about you, including your contacts, but in my case SIM could stand for SIMPLETON because it turns out I no longer know anybody’s phone number.

My own mother could call me and I’d decline the call because I wouldn’t recognize the number and don’t want to answer my phone and encourage those robo-calling assholes who try to sell me whatever service they’re hawking and I don’t require and the most current robocall is offering me assistance to pay off the back taxes I don’t owe.

So if you haven’t heard from me in a couple years I may not be “ghosting” you (and enjoy the cultural reference from this century because you might not get another) it might be because I lost your contact information which also explains why I’ll answer your text with:

“Just who the hell is this?”

That was then, this is now

Having learned my lesson the hard way I never, ever, never put my cellphone in a bathing suit pocket because if I can forget my kids’ birth dates I can sure as shit forget my phone’s in my bathing suit pocket, but I thought it was safe to put my cellphone in my cargo shorts pocket, right up until a spilled a drink on myself.

So I pull out my phone and make sure it’s not wet and there were only a few drops of liquid on it so I figured I got shot at and missed until I noticed my phone now thought it was Friday, January 1.

Which is even more dicked up than it sounds because January 1, 2022 was on a Saturday and January 1, 2023 is on a Sunday, so a few drops of liquid (OK, it was wine, but it was my first glass so you can’t blame inebriation unless you really want to) and my phone no longer knew what year it was and then I noticed incoming texts were out of order and mislabeled and a text my son sent me that night was labeled Thursday, December 31, 2015. I didn’t even buy the phone until 2018, so my phone was traveling back in time and if I could have used it to place a large bet that the Kansas City Chiefs would win the 2020 Super Bowl I would have been happy, but I couldn’t so I wasn’t.

Apparently, phones are now so complicated and touchy if you get even a few drops of liquid on them they’ll quit working and God forbid you take a selfie with the ocean in the background or your phone will catch fire and explode and you’ll go through the rest of your life being called by your new nickname, “Lefty.”

Also…

My overly-touchy cellphone now had difficulty taking a charge and as a friend pointed out, I’m about to drive from California back to Missouri and probably shouldn’t do it with a glitchy phone, so I got on my cellphone while it was still working (it would still make calls as long as I was wearing a tinfoil hat, waving a wire coat hanger in the air and chanting from the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and called up Consumer Cellular to order a new one.

Slightly off-Target

The lady who answered the phone at Consumer Cellular was very helpful and didn’t lose her goddamn mind when I couldn’t remember the correct password (I’ve got dozens of them and only have a vague idea of what they are and felt like a losing Jeopardy contestant when I said, “What is verygrouchy2017?”) and she was able to verify it was me by asking personal questions like my mother’s maiden name and the last four digits of my Social Security number and who invited me to the Sadie Hawkins dance and whether I “got lucky” that night.

(I didn’t because back then I thought “getting lucky” was having a date with a fledgling feminist who insisted on going “Dutch Treat” a now politically-incorrect term the British used to insult the perceived stinginess of the Dutch…or at least that’s the internet’s two cents worth unless the person who put it on there was Dutch, then I guess it would be their one cent’s worth and I’d owe them a penny. )

Anyway…

I explain my situation and say I’m on vacation, but will go back home soon and need the phone delivered as soon as possible and if they’ve got a Hellfire drone patrolling the area (which I’m pretty sure Amazon does) maybe they can shoot one at me, but she says I should go to the nearest Target because they’re now selling Consumer Cellular phones and I say thanks and head for a nearby Target.

I show up at Target bright and early ‘cuz I want this cellphone crap straightened out as quickly as possible (they may drive us crazy, but you get even crazier when they quit working) and head for the “Tech” department and tell a passing Target employee I want to buy a cellphone and he informs me that he can’t sell me one and I have to wait for the “Tech people” to show up and they’re supposed to be in at 10 AM, but I should probably come back at 10:30 because: “They’re really lazy.”

So clearly, Target has some internal employee issues which I decide to ignore because I’ve already got enough problems of my own. I come back at 10:30 and stand around in the Tech area for 20 minutes and ask three different people if they can call the Tech guy and they all say, “He’s around here somewhere” and tell me they’d call him on their walkie-talkie, but their walkie-talkies aren’t working so I guess the Tech people really are lazy.

So then I go looking for him myself and see a dude with “Tech” on his T-shirt and he says he’ll be right back to help me as soon as he “gets some stuff” and about 10 minutes later he shows up and I say I want a phone as close as possible to the one I already own because whenever they “improve” a cellphone you have to take a community college night class to learn how to use it and he pulls a phone out and asks if the screen is large enough and I say yes because every time I buy a new cellphone it’s bigger than the last one and if this phone was any bigger I’d have to rent a pack mule to carry it behind me.

I have been to drive-in movies with smaller screens.

He rings up my purchase and says:

“You’re good to go.”

I say what about my contact information and can we send it from my old phone to the new one and he screws around with that and then says:

“You’re good to go.”

Then I say what about my old texts and he messes with that and then says:

“You’re good to go.”

Then I say I see a connecting wire, but no charger and he says I need to buy the wall plug in, which is now a separate purchase, which would have become an issue about four hours after I left the store if I hadn’t noticed its absence and he sells that to me and once again says:

“You’re good to go.”

Then I say what about my old pictures and we spend the next half hour staring at each other while the pictures on my old phone download to my new phone and we’re still only about a third of the way through the pictures when I ask if I can just email my old pictures to my Gmail account and download them onto my new phone that way and he says yes (which turns out to be bullshit, so about two-thirds of my pictures are trapped on my old phone and I’ll have to find some Merlin the Magician in Kansas City to complete the transfer) and once again Tech Boy says I’m:

“Good to go.”

By then I was ready to move on and deal with the picture issue later, plus I realized whenever he said:

“You’re good to go.”

What he really meant was:

“It would be good if you went.”

He’d already made all the money he was going to make off me and my asking questions was a non-profit pain in the ass and I still don’t know how all the stuff on my new phone works and for now it won’t let me access my voicemail so if you leave me one I won’t get it, but I can make phone calls and send texts and I think I’ve figured out Google directions so when I go home later this week I can wend my way from Highway 80 through Denver to Highway 70 and after that spend a Month of Sundays driving across Kansas.

So Tech Boy was right, I’m now:

“Good to go.”

And a few days from now that’s just what I’ll do.