Campfyre Stories

I’ve been busy lately.  This month, in fact, there are so many goings-on that I finally dusted off Daisy’s calendar and used it.  Looking at the sheer amount of commitments I have stressed me out.

But the busier I get, the busier I become.  The more plans I make, the less often I’m home, the more often my phone rings.  Probably this is due to people confirming and cementing plans, but it’s still rather annoying.

So, yeah, apparently, my "Midas touch" hasn’t gone away, although I am EXCEEDINGLY CAREFUL about not using the word "wish", but still complaining about things and wanting, for example, people to stop calling me while I’m in the bathtub.  Frankly, it is hazardous for me to do anything in that bathtub except soak.

Anyway, here’s the latest installment in the continuing saga of Daisy:

All of a sudden, while I was trying to text someone because my mother was on the radio yesterday, I dropped the phone on the flagstone floor in my kitchen and, thus, completely lost the display on my phone.  This was not really a crisis, per se, since I could still make and receive calls, but I couldn’t do anything else with the Treo.  No contacts, no email, no web browsing, no games, no text messages, no calendar, no touchscreen, no nothing…  but still a phone.

So I call Technical Support.  They are not helpful.  We’ll leave it at that.  Frankly, Tech Support is never helpful to me.

So I back up my data and sync up my phone.  I try to dismantle the phone, but I can’t figure out how and so only accomplish taking all the screws out, then putting them all back in.  Heh.  This is probably a really good thing, because at this point I am freaking out and screaming and yelling and cursing a blue streak.  (If you look really close, you can still see the blue streak hovering above my roof.)

The thing is, that the thing I did next is one of those "Did you try this" questions that they ask.  I lied and told them I had.  I knew, I knew that I shouldn’t do it, but I was at the end of my rope and had tried everything else.  So I did a hard reset and I wiped everything out.

And then I remembered.

Before you can turn your phone on after a hard reset, you have to align the touchscreen.  In order to align the touchscreen, you have to be able to see the targets.

No phone.

 Okay…  the good news is that at this point in time, I did not SMASH MY PHONE, despite an extreme inclination to do so.  I stormed down to Stewart’s to call my mother from the nearest payphone.

Allow me here to rant for just a moment about the fact that Verizon has decided to phase out payphones in my city and probably others, however it removes the phones, but leaves the phone booths where they are,  so you don’t know there ISN’T a phone there until you’re already standing where there OUGHT to be a phone… where there USED to be a phone and now is just a shell indicated that once upon a time a phone was here.  Assholes.

See, mom has a Palm Pilot.  I was thinking maybe I could intuit where the targets were on my touchscreen by using her touchscreen alignment as a guide.  Well, it was a good idea, anyway.  It’s really a shame it didn’t work.

So I have effectively fallen off the face of the planet for the moment.  Best case scenario is that I will be able to get a replacement for this Daisy (v2) like I did back in September.  I will find that out today.  Worst case is that I’ll have to drop several hundred dollars to buy a new, upgraded Daisy on Wednesday and just be floating in space until that point in time - no phone, no text, no nothin’ for three days.  I can live, but bah! 

I didn’t actually cry about it, though.  Screamed and swore a WHOLE lot, but I didn’t cry.  I think I’m saving that for the "pity me" visit to the Sprint store to see what they can do for me.

It’s funny.  Ed says that the universe is trying to tell me that I’m too busy (or that I should have never put that stuff in my calendar).  I’m not sure if I *can* believe that, since this entire ordeal is making me MORE busy, simply because of the amount of time and effort it takes to get this whole stupid thing taken care of.

Update:  So Ed and I went on an adventure to the Mall to see what they could do for my phone.  I was hoping that my pathetic "It’s broken" would sway them to help me, but, alas, she cannot be fixed.  However (and this is why I LOVE Sprint), they would replace it for the $55 repair fee.  That’s cool.

What’s NOT cool, though, is that they don’t have any in stock, so it’s going to be at least 3 days before they can give me a new phone, and they can’t fix my touchscreen issue because, well, they can’t see the screen either.  If I thought that crying would get me a replacement phone faster, I would have, but I don’t think the salesguy has that kind of power.

Ed tried to get them to give me a loaner phone for the couple of days I’d be without, but, though they do offer that as an option (which is good to know), they don’t have any loaner phones at the moment.  Also, because the display on the phone is shot, I wouldn’t be able to forward my calls anyway.  Of course not.

So for at least the next three days I’m going ridiculously low tech and falling off the face of the planet, at least in my off hours.  As I told a friend of mine earlier, if you want to talk to me, show up on my doorstep