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.