November 17, 2003
Why My Phone Does Not Work
Last month, I ordered a new set of GSM phones for Kim and I from AT&T Wireless. My goals were to get us on the same national plan with shared minutes and to get a camera phone for me. I can’t switch providers because my 2-year AT&T contract is not up yet.
I ordered a Nokia 3650 for me and a Motorola T721 for Kim. I chose the Nokia as the camera phone because my runner-up phone, the Sony Ericsson T616, did not take VGA-quality pictures. The Sony seems to be targeted at people who like to send their camera phone pictures to other phone users. That isn’t me. I want to post to my blog.
I already did the work to enable my Movable Type installation to receive e-mails with photo attachments and post them. I took the mtmail script and hacked it so that it would store pictures in the location and with the name and format I wanted.
So I received the phones overnight, charged them up, and then called to activate them. Bad news — a computer upgrade is preventing AT&T from activating phones. Call back tomorrow. Anyway, I have gotten the same answer for 15 days now. Turns out the media found out about this and has been following the story. Hopefully, this keeps the focus on it.
This weekend they finally started coming back online and they said my activation is going through in the next 24 to 48 hours. My older phones stopped working immediately of course but my new phones are laying here dead. They both say “no service”.
So I have to fly tonight with a camera phone that can’t act as a phone. Wonderful. In the words of Bill Maher:
New Rule: I Don’t Need my Cell Phone to Play Video Games or Take Pictures or Double as a Walkie-Talkie—I Just Need it to Work
Why is getting to level four of Tomb Raider no problem but, to have a simple conversation, I have to stand on a hill with one hand on a flagpole? Thanks for all the bells and whistles, but I could communicate better with actual bells and whistles. Let’s not lose sight of the cell phone’s primary purpose: to annoy other people in the restaurant.
