The generation gap of cell phones

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . March 11, 2010 . 6:25PM

Last night, my phone rang and something told me not to answer the call. Not that it was a bill collector, or a survey, or even the pizza guy telling me he couldn’t deliver for some lame reason that would cause wailing or gnashing of teeth. No, I’d been sick since Saturday and didn’t feel like talking. I barely looked at the phone and willed it to stop ringing.

It ignored me and did what phones do. Glad to see someone around here has a work ethic, because this week I want to crawl in bed with a hot man and a bowl of soup and watch The Golden Girls while I lament about how our bodies break down and it’s not fair that mucus comes out of so many orifices of the body at a rate that is unequal to the rate of liquid I’m putting into my body.

I picked up the phone and saw that it was mom, which was good because I’ve been wanting my mommy for days. I answered and was immediately accosted with the accusation that my son was NOT responding to text messages.

Let this sink in for a minute.

My 9-year old…is not responding…to his grandmother’s text messages.

Now I get to explain why this is a huge deal.

AJ has a cell phone. He’s had one for almost 2 years of a 2 year deal. He does extra chores, beyond his regular ones, to help pay for the $10 his contract costs us every month. He takes his phone with him to his friend’s house and it has come in very handy. His phone has music on it and games and it keeps him from getting too bored.

Recently, Leon and I had made the decision to allow him to have text messaging. He is only allowed to text me and Leon and those who are in his address book. Those people include family and close family friends. He may only text them with their permission and ours. This is a strict rule. He is learning sentence structure and proper communication skills as well as spelling and it seems to be helping.

When I told my mother that AJ was getting unlimited text messaging (to avoid any potential charges and because we have it on a family plan), she groaned. My mother has held out on text messaging for years. In fact, when anyone would mention text messaging, she would groan, glare at us and say “Well, don’t you dare text me. That costs money!”

My mother is not an old woman. She is not yet 50. However, she is incredibly frugal and does not buy anything that is not on sale. She gets angry about how Abercrombie has their name on all of their shirts and that my sister and I do not necessarily share her ideas on thriftiness. She has held out on the peer pressure for text messaging from friends and other family members for ages. My sister and I have begged her to get text messaging for years.

Nope. It wasn’t happening.

3 weeks ago, I mentioned that AJ was getting unlimited messaging and that he would be sending her messages.

Say what you want about the woman, but she’s a devoted NeeNee.

She called last night TICKED that she’s been text messaging AJ like crazy and he won’t text her back.

Love. It’s a funny thing.

Cell phone carriers restricting customer phone options?

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 23, 2009 . 5:56PM

Luckily for T-mobile, I’m not a customer, or I would take the 45 minutes it would likely take me to get through to their customer service and give them an earful after reading an article on consumerist.com. Apparently, as consumers, we are no longer allowed to buy our phones where we choose and we must buy them from the carrier itself or risk some kind of ominous unknown threat. I’m not sure what the threat is, but Meg Marco notes:

When the salesperson was ringing me up, she started trying to set up the phone. I told her not to worry about it because I wasn’t going to be using it as a pre-paid phone, but I was going to put my own SIM card in there. She got really quiet and sad that she would “have to pretend that I didn’t hear that.”

You’re going to pretend you didn’t hear that? Or what? Are you going to terminate your contract with me? At what cost? Unless you find a way to make phones indestructible, phones are going to break and things are going to happen and unless replacement policies get better, people are going to say “screw your new phones, I’m getting a used one until my 2 years is up.”

Recently, I did this when my LG Voyager just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. There was nothing wrong with it other than I hated the phone. It wasn’t intuitive and the excessive amount of money I would need to pay for each and every application made me realize that it was just another cash cow for my phone carrier. I reluctantly went back to the blackberry, buttcalls and all. Frankly, I’ve never been happier in my life. The little Pink Pearl telephone I got off of craigslist is smaller than most blackberries and I feel bad that I didn’t listen to my friend, Clay, when he told me years ago that the pearl was the way to go. For having large man hands, my palms are surprisingly small and this is a nice fit for me.

However, if Verizon had suddenly made some snide comment that I could not use the pearl, which is one of their recognized phones or that they “hadn’t heard that I got it off of craigslist” I would have been inclined to shoot fire out of my mouth at the rep because a phone carrier may carry my service, but I’m not required to keep the same phone I bought with the plan and, if I were, I’d go elsewhere. If I wanted to buy a pay by the minute phone to stick a Sim card in (for carriers that use them), I should be able to do so with a rep that cheerfully offers to help me because this is like any other business and a paying customer is a paying customer.

Have these people never heard about “giving ‘em the pickle?” Giving ‘em the pickle is a customer service technique which means going above and beyond the call of duty to gain and keep customers. It’s explained on the linked website, but the key is that if you can make your customers happy by giving them pickles for their sandwiches, why would you deny them something so small? T-mobile, you were still making money from this? Why would you deny this person something so small or encourage your reps to make others feel bad based on what they afford to get by? Hopefully, someone out there is rethinking this policy because it seems like losing customers over pre-paid cells is a silly policy.

AJ’s leftovers

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 2, 2009 . 6:39PM

April 14, 2009
AJ said that if he got bitten by a King “Crowba” (Cobra), he would spend his last 30 minutes alive doing “whatever he wanted” which would include eating all the ice cream he wanted, riding rollercoasters and killing the King Crowba.

April 18, 2009
Today, I noticed AJ had two red spots on his face, one over each eyebrow. I was worried that he’d gotten some kind of funky sunburn so I asked him, “Adrian, what’s going on over your eyes?” and pointed to that area. He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Eyebrows?” Yep. I deserved that.

April 27, 2009
Over the weekend, AJ had a baseball game and then it has become a new tradition that those of our adult friends that come to the game come over for dinner and games. AJ is particularly drawn to one friend who said he may or may not come and we were having fun leaving him a couple of silly messages while trying to find out if we should be waiting for him or go ahead with dinner plans. Then the bottom dropped out.

AJ: “Ohhh, this will be a good message.”
Me: “I can’t wait to hear it!”
AJ: *thoughtful* Hrm. Mom, Can I leave bad words on this message?
Me: NO! You cannot leave BAD WORDS on this message. You can’t say bad words in normal talking and you cannot leave it on a message.
AJ: *giggling hysterically and leaves a message berating said friend for not being at his game*
Me: *aside to the adults* “Now I’m always going to wonder what his message would have been?”