Crunchy Phone

Praline: Lark's vomit?

Milton: Correct.

Praline: Well it don't say nothing about that here.

Milton: Oh yes it does, on the bottom of the box, after monosodium glutamate.

Praline: (looking) Well I hardly think this is good enough. I think it would be more appropriate if the box bore a large red label, “WARNING, LARK’S VOMIT.”

Milton: Our sales would plummet.

Crunchy Frog Sketch, Monty Python

Why do we put up with this?

Before mobile phones, cell phones, and smart phones, a telephone was a heavy device that sat on a counter or was mounted to a wall, usually in the kitchen or living room. It never, ever broke down. It worked even if the power went out. And not getting coverage meant there were no telephone poles in your neighborhood; you wouldn’t have to hold your phone up like an Olympic Torch and spin around waiting for coverage.

Now we have phones which are really computers. They browse the web, run a million different apps, take increasingly higher and higher resolution photographs, and even make calls. But there are tradeoffs for all these conveniences. The tradeoffs are things like the incomprehensible service restrictions, charges that change depending on your use and where you are when you use it, having no service from one place to another, and batteries that run out.

We wanted to get phones for our two boys, just for emergencies. We purchased two AT&T Go phones and $25 refill cards, that boasted “Unlimited talk, text &web; Nationwide.” We purchase a new refill card for one of the phones the other day but when I tried to load it, I got the message, “Sim not provisioned MM #2.”

I called AT&T and dutifully recited the above message. That message, as it turns out, means the SIM card in the phone has expired. When this happens you can no longer add minutes to the phone and must go out and purchase a new SIM card; at $25. That error message should read, “Phone is broken, go buy new stuff.” I’m beginning to think that either AT&T or I don’t understand the meaning of “unlimited.”

The phone when we purchased it only cost $15 and it came with this SIM card. The customer service rep asked me, “Did you read all the paperwork that came with the phone?” I said I didn’t and added that I doubted if anyone has read that small print, going all the way back to when the second “T” in AT&T stood for telegraph. If I had to guess, there is probably a line of text buried in that literature that says something like, “You’ll have to buy a new SIM card in awhile because this phone expires.” Like the avian vomit in the sketch above, the customer would be better served if it said that on the front of the phone, but AT&T's sales would probably take a hit.

Maybe it one of those you-get-what-you-pay-for things. Maybe spending $15 every couple of months – plus $25 for the refills – isn’t that big a deal. But I don’t know. Why can’t we just get a phone that works, continues to work, for X dollars a month? Maybe we can. To be perfectly honest we may be able to, but I find when I talk to a sales person about mobile phones, my mind starts to wander after about a minute or so and his/her droning on starts putting me in a coma.

Shingled White Male

An open letter to the makers or Tylenol:

Dear Sirs,

Your product does not work. It does not relieve the simplest of discomfort not to mention outright pain. It does nothing for headaches, sore muscles, joint pain, bumps or bruises, not to mention the pain associated with shingles for which your snake oil was prescribed to me. I was even given the version that is mixed with codeine which seemed like surrender on your part because isn’t codeine a pain reliever in its own right? But it matters not; it didn’t work either.

Congratulations on producing a product that does not work yet is recommended by medical professionals that must number in the millions. Kudos to your staff of lying-ass sales people and marketing pukes for fostering upon those of us who actually could use some relief something that works less often than a placebo. You must be very proud.

You guys are brilliant for making something that not only does not produce the results promised, but also something that you can never be called on for the obvious fakery of it all. Imagine if you produced airplanes that didn’t fly or fire extinguishers that didn’t put out fires. You’d be out of business in minutes and maybe even face jail time.

Well done and go to hell.

We thought it was poison oak. After all, about a week before we had been staying at a hotel on the Merced River just outside the Highway 140 entrance to Yosemite, and I’ll admit I went off the path once or twice during those two days, and even though poison oak bushes are leafless in January, I’ve caught it from the branches alone before. So Andrea put Biofreeze on the blisters/bumps sprinkled along the part in my hair, and I fully expected them to be just a memory in no time.

Then new ones showed up on the left side of my face. I remember reading a Sherlock Holmes story years ago where the detective said that the Latin root word for sinister (sinistra) also meant left, so it makes sense that the left side of my noodle would be the one to betray me.

The doctor introduced himself and before I could reply he said, “Shingles.” He prescribed ointment, anti-viral pills, and the aforementioned Tylenol with codeine, and said something about a “Month of Misery.” Then he sent me to an opthamologist who prescribed drops for my left eye.

The first week was the worst. I was exhausted all the time, the sun had become a hated enemy, and the “sinister” side of my face looked as if I had been bird hunting with Dick Cheney maybe a week before.

Nighttime is the worst of the worst. The Phanom-of-the-Opera affected area from the top of my scalp, down the left side of my face to just under my eye, pulses between pain, numbness, and itching if you can believe that. It’s just enough of each to keep me awake; the “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself” of symptoms.

2012 actually started out pretty good. I had gone to City College to see what the quickest path to a degree was with the courses I’d already taken back when my future was still my future and Stevie Ray Vaughn hadn’t gotten on that helicopter. It turned out that I only needed four lousy classes to get an AA in English. Not an MBA from Harvard but much, much more than nothing to me. I would have to sit in though since it was late in the process an hope there was room to add. I sat in on an American Lit class during the day and a Creative Writing class at night. When the shingles hit, I couldn’t attend either so now I’ll have to wait until summer session.

A week later I had the best job interview since perhaps September. I never got a call back and if I did, I couldn’t have gone in for maybe two weeks, probably longer.

As if the 6 months of unemployment didn’t put a strain on my most important relationship, now my “not getting any better” added pressure to that strain. Before I just wasn’t a provider now I’m a take-away-er. Tempers are shorter, my interest in pretty much everything is dulled, and I’ve applied for a total of three jobs since the start of the year, whereas I applied for nearly 200 in the proceeding five months.

An open letter to God, or whomever:

To Whom It May Concern,

WTF?