Well, I have had an interesting couple of days with phones my friends. It all started in New London Connecticut this past Saturday evening. I had just attended Carl Franklin's birthday party, watched a wickedly funny taping of his show Mondays (that I was part of in the early days) and of attempted to learn to like bourbon (it didn't take, I think I'll stick to fine wine) and saw some good friends like Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randall (the newlyweds), Richard Campbell and Stacy Holt, Scott Hanselman and his lovely wife Mo, Patrick Hynds and lovely wife Sabine, Miguel Castro, Mark Miller, Don XML and of course the birthday boy himself, Carl Franklin and his lovely wife Gretchen (the hostess with the mostess).
I returned to the hotel after this...and as I slept peacefully my Motorola Q was supposedly charging happily through the USB connection to my laptop. Something tragic happened this unsuspecting night. I woke to the Q completely dead...the power to the wall no longer servicing the laptop...but the laptop still had charge which meant that I had power for most of the night...for sure (Vista would have sucked it dry of charge in 1.5 hours flat). The phone should have been charging and greedily sucking laptop battery power...so I knew something was amiss.
In haste I plugged the laptop in elsewhere and tried connecting the phone once again. Not one of my USB ports of my Sony Vaio (the old laptop) would give the phone charge. Concerned, I fired up the new Acer Travelmate, trying its USB ports...one of them gave charge. Relief...or so I thought. So I grabbed a coffee and strolled down to the beach for 1 hour, expecting to return to a charged Q...ready to use.
NOT.
The Q was not charged enough to boot at least. Try as I might, nothing would give the Q enough charge to boot.
I went down to brunch with Richard, Stacy, Kimberly and Paul...for sure one of them would have a suggestion for my problem. They are geeks after all (well, except Stacy...she's cooler than a geek). In fact, Stacy thought I could revive it with the wall charger, thus I had to wait patiently to arrive home before I could be sure.
I felt naked without my phone...and I had to fly home that way.
This was the beginning of the nightmare I call "will I get home tonight?".
If I had had my working cell phone, I would have logged in to the internet to see if my upgrade went through, and discovered the flight was delayed 4 hours leaving Providence. Alas, I find this out at the airport, and they put me on standby for the earlier flight that was supposed to leave at 2pm, now leaving at 5pm, which is when my flight was supposed to leave. So many questions:
And so Part 1 of the nightmare begins...
There was a line of Verizon pay phones right by the gate so I stared at them for a few minutes first, trying to remember how to use them. Let's see, you can use coins, a calling card (no go here), or credit card. It looks like you can get 4 minutes with 4 quarters, so I went for it, I got change.
Now I'm sick of putting in the dang credit card number every call, so I hook up my laptop. Of course no cell phone so I have to get a T-Mobile day pass first...now I'm online. Yes! I have Skype-to-phone all hooked up...so I call my cell and check messages...nothing yet. Where's Gillian?
Wait a bit, IM with Richard and Carl about my delay...wish I was having dinner and drinks over there...standby sucks.
We finally have an ETA to leave Providence on the standby flight...later than we thought, I'm definitely missing my connection. Oh, by the way all of this due to weather in Chicago...they were in chaos over there.
I get on standby...awesome...but I'm still going to miss my connection so that's the next mess to deal with in Chicago.
Arrive to Chicago in one piece...OMG the airport is in complete chaos...people laying around all over the place...piles and piles in each gate area...just a mess.
I go to a pay phone again. I'm scared, I can hear the theme from Jaws in my head as I approach the line of pay phones...but I go in to make the call anyways. There was no room to sit and fire up my computer.
At this point I'm really pissed. I go to the United Red Carpet lounge...fire up the computer, fire up Skype.
At last, the phone call hell ends. I can go to my gate, catch my second late flight, and make my way home to sleep. If only I had more battery left in my computer to get more work done.
Now, to deal with the broken phone.
Charging it in the wall charger didn't solve the problem...call Verizon. No, not from a pay phone...from a home phone. We try to reset the phone, no go. Luckily I'm within tye 1 year warranty, they'll ship me a new Q overnight! Yeah! So, we switch the phone number over to my backup phone, the VCast Chocolate. And here another short saga begins...but I'll save that for the next post.
The moral of this story is:
Remember Me
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