the cell phone saga

meet my current cell phone... as of less than four hours ago.

it's a samsung sway.  and i actually got it several years ago right before we moved to california... sooo fall of 2009.  it was cute and sleek and had all these cute font options and everything... i was in love.  but then for the next 8 or 9 months as i was loving everything else about my phone, i was hating the super short battery life.  standby time was less than 24 hours and the talk time was about 1 hour before the battery was drained and the phone shut off.  it was a huge pain.  after a million equally terrible refurbished phone replacements (can't verizon just admit it's a crappy phone that shouldn't be on the market and refund my money for a working phone?!) i gave up.  we struck a deal with the store manager that i could get a brand new phone as long as i started my two year contract over again from the current date.  so basically he let me out of the other two year contract and i started a new one, getting a new phone with it.  it was better than nothing but i was still annoyed to have to start a new contract.  and during that 8 months, verizon had changed their policy on phones and data packages so there were about 4 options for phones that didn't require a pricey data package... and they all sucked.  oh well... i got one anyways, just excited for a phone that i could talk on for more than an hour and didn't have to charge multiple times a day.

enter the lg cosmos.

i tried to console myself that maybe this phone would be cool because it slid open to reveal a full keyboard and might be easier for texting and stuff.  and actually it had a few things on there that i really liked... like the way it grouped my text messages by person.  i used this phone for almost a full two years.  until 2.4.12 actually... when i posted this post... after dropping my trusty lg cosmos in the toilet.  it actually dried out and worked somewhat after a few days but the wires were loose so to speak.  certain buttons did random unrequested tasks.  and occasionally it would just start scrolling through my contacts quickly and indefinitely until i turned off the phone.  i said goodbye to the cosmos and hello to...

honey's phone from 2006.  

i don't even know the name of this thing.  but it's six years old.  and it looked it.  iphone friends that had previously made fun of my cosmos for being a dumb phone were now speechless with the return of this ancient flip phone.  this phone had the mp3 option so if you pressed that "play" button you see there on the front, it would blast out your stored music.  i think there are less than 10 songs on there.  all from a chris merritt cd we bought at a provo street concert that first summer we were married.  talk about fond memories. and by the way, i sure miss our provo house.  anyways... this phone had some cons... short battery life (because it was so old) and that even if the phone was on silent, if that play button got pressed in my pocket or purse, it would blast out chris merritt.  which seemed to keep happening at very inopportune times.  like a baptisms and such.  or when i was leaning over the crib to place my drowsy babe inside... BAM!  CHRIS MERRITT!  and baby startled wide awake.  anyways... the main plus side was that a dance party was only a click away, and i really enjoyed that it was an extremely easy phone to text on.  oh wait... maybe the biggest con ever?  it was made before texting was big so the inbox held a grand total of... wait for it... 56 texts before it would start rejecting messages and telling you to clear out your inbox.  chris had some texts on that phone "locked" that couldn't be deleted... so really i only had space to receive about 30 texts before i had to start deleting them to clear more room.  that took more time out of my day than picking out what clothes to wear.  which trust me is a lot.  because i HATE picking out clothes in the morning.  loathe entirely.

anyways, i was able to overlook those cons and appreciate that i had a working phone.  i just kept brainwashing myself that i must have the easiest phone ever to text on.  my life with this est. 2006 phone was great until one april morning about two weeks ago, when my phone stopped making sound.  it wouldn't ring, it wouldn't alert me for texts, it wouldn't make a noise if i set the alarm to wake me up in the morning.  and if i made/answered a phone call, i couldn't hear a single thing coming from the other end.  it was a phone that couldn't make phone calls.  but at least i could see missed calls and respond with texts.  if i needed to have an actual conversation with someone i could either use honey's phone in the evening, or if it was family/close friends, we would just skype.  it actually was only inconvenient a handful of times.  one being that one of my best friends, jodi, doesn't own a cell phone because they give her migraines.  she only has a house phone... which doesn't text.  the only other annoying times were twice when i had a back and forth text conversations with christopher that took ten minutes when it could have been replaced with a 20 second phone call.  other than that, i really didn't mind not ever hearing my phone ring.  although i will say one weird thing is that it wasn't completely mute.  it would ring if my christopher called (he had a different ringtone than everyone else) and it still would blast chris merritt in awkward situations.  i asked my mother to send me her old razr phone asap monday morning.  because honestly, it's really scary knowing that if something happened to your child, you'd have no way to call 911.  it came in the mail wednesday afternoon (having a mute phone for almost a week, this was SUPER exciting!)  i literally tore it out of the box, and flew out the door to hit up the verizon store before our relief society activity.  it took about 10 mins to transfer activation and contacts and i was out of there.  when i asked the guy why the sound only worked sometimes he explained that it was a software error but that since the phone is so old, they don't make software updates for it anymore.  bye bye honey's 2006 phone.

hola mom's old razr.

this is actually the third razr phone i've had in my lifetime.  the first one was pink and i was in love with it.  like IN LOVE.  it fell in the toilet.  i was so sad and crushed that honey surprised me with a new pink razr off of craigslist.  after using it for a long time, the screen went haywire and i had to get a new phone... i think that's when i got the sway.  ANYWAYS... this was my phone from last wednesday night until this morning.  not even a full week.  i was very grateful to have a phone that had sound but three things about this phone absolutely killed me.  first, it used iTAPEN to text... not word.  for someone that's been texting with word for the last several years, this made my texting about as efficient as a 90 year old on an ipad.  also, there was  a six second delay between the time you pressed a button and the time the screen changed.  my phone would make a little ding, i'd see that the screen said "message from _____" and click okay to view.  an then i'd wait. one, two, three, four, five, six... actually, maybe it was longer than six seconds.  and if you really want to know how long six seconds is... watch it tick away on a wall clock.  like a little miniature eternity.  anyways... when i thought the suspense was just too much to bear, the message would finally appear.  you think this is something you'll get used to after a day or two.  i am here to tell you that is not the case.  it is actually just the opposite.  anyways, the third con... battery life... go figure.  just because it was so old it needed to be charged twice a day.  once over night and then once during the late afternoon.  so the max it could be unplugged was about 7 hours.  not at all inconvenient.  regardless, i am extremely grateful to my mother for lending me this phone... i appreciated it while it lasted.  which as i said was about 6 days.  because after our young womens kickboxing activity last night, i had to stay for a youth conference meeting.  and i had baby girl with me because honey's out of town.  well, she was doing really great on my lap for the first half hour but then got anxious and fidgety.  i don't know if i had my phone in my hand or in my lap or in my pocket or what but at one point, baby was squirming on my lap and the razr phone fell to the ground.  the back popped off and the phone turned off.  with most phones, this is pretty common if it's dropped.  so i picked it up, popped everything back in place and turned it on... the keypad lit up but the screen did not.  and has not since.  i could answer incoming phone calls but without a screen couldn't make outgoing calls, see missed calls, text, or do anything else.  having a phone without sound is infinitely better than a phone without a screen.  

so this morning we went to the park with friends from church and although it was hugely inconvenient that i wasn't able to text anyone that i needed to, it was once again the panic that, in an emergency, i wouldn't be able to call for help.   i went straight home (i was in such a hurry that i left abigail buckled in her car seat in the garage while i ran upstairs to look for more phones.  we have a plastic bucket upstairs where we keep random electronic stuff like old phones.  rifling through there i found my old samsung sway that i'd completely forgotten about!  i grabbed that and its charger, got in the car and went straight to verizon.  it was almost 12 30 which is creeping up on lunchtime but i wasn't worried because last time it only took ten mins to activate a different phone.  well, for other random reasons, it took over an hour inside the verizon store and multiple calls to customer service from both of my parents as well as the verizon rep helping me.  baby girl did great but i definitely had a headache when we walked out at 1 30.  it is no simple task to entertain a toddler in a verizon store for an hour.  but i have a functioning phone now (i'm sincerely hoping the battery life is not as terrible as i remember it... although at least i'm in the habit of twice a day cell phone charging now) and i'm thrilled!  because as stated before... this is a cute little phone, it texts with word, and i think i'm going to love it.  so let's just all pray that i'm not cursed and that the software on this phone won't give out anytime soon.  because as i'm sure we can all guess... they most likely don't have updates for the sway!

i kind of feel like i need a family tree or ancestry.com or something to showcase my cell phone lineage.  until they invent that sort of thing, this picture will have to suffice.  the cosmos begat the mp3 flip phone, and the mp3 flip phone begat the razr, and the razr begat the sway.  and thus ended the ten weeks in the spring of 2012.

although i find this a little amusing because it was actually the low battery life sway that begat the cosmos.  so is the circle of life cell phones.

so there you have it, as promised in this post (which was, ironically, before this most recent phone break), my rant about cell phones.  and in case it wasn't clear, i will clarify that we don't have a house phone so my cell phone is my only phone.  and if there was ever an emergency, it is my only way to call for help.  no working cell phone = no way to dial 911.  so, for safety reasons, i make it a point to always have a sufficiently charged and working cell phone.