Wednesday, June 2, 2010

I thought technology was supposed to make things easier

I used to like Windows Live Writer.

Until I realized that not every post that I published through them actually published.

If you like Live Writer, please be aware that I get random problems no one else ever does.

It seems to be my super power.

The trouble is that as a blond people think I have a lower IQ than average. So they think its my fault.

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My wonderful husband decided that I needed a smart phone and I would actually use the bells and whistles on it. So after looking around I decided I wanted a Blackberry. At first I thought the Blackberry Curve but then decided with the spotty reception at my home I wanted a phone with a bit more oomph.

So then I thought the Blackberry Bold would be a great choice. Except it was out of stock so B*stB*y had to order it. So on Sunday they ordered it and said it should be there within 3 or 4 days.

Not a big deal and with the tracking stuff available now, I could obsess to my hearts content about when my phone would be in my hand.

Except it didn't seem to be shipping. It was supposed to ship within 24 hours and 2 days later, it still hadn't shipped.

And while I was waiting I was doing research and found out the Blackberry Bold 9700 seemed to be so much better than the Bold 9000. So Tuesday I thought that I could just go cancel the order - because it still hadn't shipped - and change to the 9700.

Wrong.

Because it was ordered in my husband's name, I couldn't cancel it. They were barely able to give me information on the order - and probably shouldn't have done that. Because in some things we are still stuck in the 1950s.

And hour later, I left with no new phone and the knowledge that my husband could call and cancel the order but it would be better to wait until the 9000 came in and return it to the store because they could do an upgrade reversal right then. If we called to cancel, we might have an extra few days before we could do the upgrade.

Except that that information was wrong.

The next day (Wednesday) the phone arrived at 5:00 and at 5:15 I was at B*stB*y wanting to swap out phones. At 9:15 I left with my old phone and with the knowledge that it takes an upgrade reversal 1-3 days and we would have been better off canceling the order and starting the upgrade reversal then. In that 4 hours, my husbands phone was shut off and then he had to have his sim card changed which meant all his contacts were messed up.

Friday I called our cell phone provider about something else - B*stB*y's maneuverings had put my husband's phone on the $30 data plan and his phone will barely text so I wanted to cancel it. I asked during the course of conversation how long the upgrade reversal would take and ended up telling the whole long convoluted story to the person I was talking to (believe it or not, I seriously simplified it here).

She asked for the number to the local B*stB*y to verify that I no longer had the phone and then her supervisor immediately put the reversal through so that I would FINALLY be able to go get a phone.

An hour later I had a new phone and two hours later we discovered that B*stB*y had somehow canceled my husbands voicemailbox - he wouldn't have known except I called to leave him a message and then told him I left a message.

Luckily our cell phone provider was able to easily fix it - but he might have missed some messages in those 2 days that he didn't have a mailbox.

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My new phone, I love it. I actually get reception inside the house and don't have to tilt my head at a certain angle. I have a calendar that will actually sync with the computer and store more than 100 events. And I love the QWERTY keyboard. And don't get me started on the apps I have found.

I thought about doing an iphone but it seems almost like the Guess? jeans from high school and really, I am too old for all that. There were things that I don't like about it (I dislike the idea of a touch screen) and the only benefits I can see of an iphone over my blackberry is "words with friends" and the whole "everyone else has one". Quite frankly though, I would also feel like a lemming if I had gone with an iphone without better reasons than that.

Maybe at some point I will do an iphone but right now I <3 my blackberry.

1 comment:

  1. I have the Blackberry Curve and love it. Granted, I'm not putting it through the rigors of say, a business person or mom-on-the-go with 27 different activities planned in a weeks' time, but I use it for pretty much everything else. Ultimately, I still just wanted a phone, not a computer disguised as one.

    I'm with you on the whole touch screen thing. Maybe by the time I upgrade (December) my mind will change if there's a phone that really grabs my attention, but being OCD about cleanliness, I find it disturbing how smeared and smudged they get (in part why I seriously don't get how poeple can use the iPad computer! YUCK! Fingerprints on my laptop screen drive me BONKERS!). My Blackberry is bad enough just from rubbing up against my face after talking on it!

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