Cut off from the world, a liveblog
My cell phone died yesterday. Well, it didn’t really die, but it’s critically ill and in a coma. The screen flashes on and off, I can’t receive calls, and it’s totally unresponsive.
So now I’m on the phone with “Alicia,” my helpful and friendly Indian customer-service representative. I’m telling her about my problem, and how it is entirely due to a manufacturing defect by Motorola, since the phone has not suffered any physical damage.
Now she’s putting me on hold for the moment, and the hold music is some haunting sitar stuff with a cool beat. Someone at Verizon has a sense of humor, anyway.
Back to Alicia. She’s telling me my options:
- Remove the battery and put it back in
- Call Verizon
- Take it in to a service center
- Send it in to Motorola to get fixed under warranty
Okay, thank you, Alicia. Bye-bye.
Here are the problems with those options:
- Did not work.
- Verizon’s reps are friendly, but not very empowered to help the customer with problems.
- I think they’re gonna charge me an arm and a leg.
- It’ll take two weeks, during which time I’ll either be without a phone, or using an old one which I’ll have to activate.
Damn.
A perfect example of the Mobility problem in Houston.
Without an active cell phone you are forced to use an instrument “tethered” by wire to the building. ERGO, NO MOBILITY.
In a like manner, millions of Houstonians who rely on rubber-tired mobility, are being shortchanged by METRO as a result of the diversion of over a 1/2-billion dollars of precious taxpayers’ funds on an ill-devised tram, which is tethered to a sparking wire. What is worse, METRO wants to squander billions more in taxpayer-obligated bonds to build more boondogle urban rail, which will also be unsafe, unreliable, and underutilized, which too will be thethered to a sparking wire.