Nokia Reincarnation (the new phone)

Nokia Reincarnation (the new phone)
Originally uploaded by spunky star fruit girl.

The phone started acting funny so I turned it off... and then it would not turn back on. The next 24 hours were somewhat angsty: finding the numbers of people I was meeting up with that night, then not being able to text or call friends when we split up into smaller groups, not being able to call my friend Elizabeth in California to debrief the events of the night at 2AM EDT, trying to get a hold of people by email early Sunday morning to try to make plans for the day, and then waiting until noon to go to the Sprint store since it was Sunday and wouldn't open until noon.

When I got to the Sprint store I put my name on the list, and when my name was called I explained to the customer service agent that I had tried to prevent this from happening way back in June. At that time, the phone wasn’t charging properly so I took it to the store, went through the ordeal of waiting in line for an hour, and was told by an agent that someone would contact me in three to five business days once a free replacement phone arrived at the store. I waited two weeks or so and called the store, was redirected to an 800 number, and then redirected to an answering machine at the store. I left a message and no one ever called me back.

Yeah, I could have been even more proactive at the time. I could have spent more time on hold on the phone or leaving more messages or driving to the store and waiting in line to be told the same thing all over again. But since my phone was working I fell into complacency. The customer service agent was sure to lecture me that my phone was my responsibility. Apparently, good customer service was not her responsibility or her coworkers? After a lot of bickering back and forth she told me that rather than us wasting our breath why don’t I go talk to the manager.

I waited patiently for the manager to finish the breath-wasting conversation he was engaged in, with a customer who hadn’t paid his bill but wanted his phone turned back on. I then told the manager the whole story. He looked into it. After clicking some buttons on his computer and going into the back room, he came back with a newer model of my phone. He clicked a few more buttons and soon thereafter I had my reincarnated Nokia phone.

Sure, it would have been kind of fun to get a whole new phone, after enduring the pain of picking one out, shelling out the cash (actually, plastic) and learning how to use a new phone. But I was satisfied to walk away with the reincarnation. Hopefully I’m still eligible for an upgrade in December... didn’t think to ask that, oops.

Involuntarily purging a lot of information can come with its advantages. I can think of two times this happened to me. A few years ago I had a Hotmail account that contained a number of emails I was only keeping for sentimental reasons. At that time, Hotmail deleted everything in your account if you didn’t log in for thirty days. I was away on vacation and forgot to log on... and when I finally did, everything was gone. Technology helped me learn how to become a little less of a pack rat, to let go of the past, and purge.

I’m still not that good at it; most of my info-purging is still involuntary. When my phone decided to go kaput, there was a teeny-weeny little sense of relief. Gone are the numbers of guys who I shouldn’t call and who will probably never call me. Gone are the numbers of so-called friends uninterested in calling back. Gone are the numbers of people I met once and know I am never going to call but whose numbers were still in my phone just in case.

Between having other ways to contact people such as email, Friendster, mutual friends/relatives/co-workers, and my excellent Google-stalking skills, I think I can get a hold of people if I really want to. Also, I do live in Smaltimore and I run into people I know in places like the Hong Kong airport or in the cable car line in San Francisco or on Devon Street in Chicago. Or I meet people on the East Coast who somehow know people I knew back in Iowa.

There is a little fear that some people will be difficult to google-stalk and who might actually want to hear from me and now I’ve lost their info... but thankfully I am easy to google-stalk even if they aren’t.

I am very reluctant to change my cell phone number for a whole bunch of ridiculous “just in case” reasons... but I don’t know if there is a way to involuntarily lose my 215 area code.

As a result of this involuntarily purge, I’ve emailed a whole bunch of people I haven’t talked to in a long time... the irony is how losing all my phone numbers has made me more connected to my world!