Rants

On Friday night I did finally get through to a CSR and finally got my point across that the phone was broke as I have had it for a week now and the signal strength meter has even twitched off of nothing, zero bars, nada, zippo. Of course the warehouse was closed, so it was too late to get a new phone shipped out to me. They are going to send it FedEx overnight on Monday and it was to be here next Tuesday.

The reason I say was is because tonight when we got back from the mountains, I had to set about a dozen clocks in various rooms and to make them match as close as possible I needed a correctly set timepiece to carry around with me. Since neither Donna nor I own a watch the only thing I could think of to use was the worthless cell phone. After syncing the time on the phone to the time on the PC, off I went. Somewhere about mid job I noticed something strange on the phone display, bars on the left side indicating that I was getting a signal to the phone! I dialed it’s number from the home phone and it rang. I couldn’t answer it as the CSR had emptied the minutes in preparation for adding them back to the new phone when it got here.

I called the Tracfone customer service number and after a short wait I was hooked up with my minutes and held in my hand a working cell phone (a week late.) Now there are only two questions remaining: 1) Will I get a phone via FedEx on Tuesday? and 2) How long will this phone work?

Called Tracfone customer service today at lunch and was lead through a series of steps, one of which was restoring factory defaults, and when nothing worked the barely understandable CSR said I am turning this over to our tech department. If it doesn’t start working by 1:00PM call back. Here is your case number. Tonight, still nothing so I tried to call just now and got a busy signal. Waited a few minutes and tried again. This time the phone rang and it was answered by a recording that announced, “Due to high call volume, you call cannot be completed, please try again later.”

Last weekend regular gas was going for $2.42 a gallon. Yesterday it was $2.29. In the business section of today’s paper there was an article titled, “Oil Companies See Record Profits in 4th Quarter.” Do you think that the sudden drop had anything to do with public relations?

Is it just me or do the new GM minivans look an awful lot like the Mutt Cutt van from the movie Dumb and Dumber?

Donna and I have an occasional need for a cell phone, so last year we started looking about for the cheapest way to get a cell phone that met our needs. We really didn’t need to sign up with one of the big guys for $30 a month and a hundreds of anytime minutes. Nor did we want a two year commitment with substantial penalties to bail out earlier. After doing a bit of internet research on the pay as you go type phones we settled on a company called Tracfone.

The smallest minutes card you can buy is 40 for $19.99 and it is good for 60 days. If you don’t use the minutes they just roll over, but you have to buy another card in 60 days or your service will be discontinued. Because we use so few minutes our bank of airtime is up over 100 minutes. So no matter how you shake it, it’ll cost us about $10 a month for a cell phone.

Recently Donna’s mom decided she wanted a cell phone too. Her use will probably be less than ours so we bought another Tracfone. For $30 you get 20 minutes and a Nokia 1100 phone. It arrived last Thursday. I went online and activated the phone. Unlike the last time for us, this phone didn’t get up and running with in an hour. The support section on the web site said give it 24 hours and if it doesn’t come up call. I left it on overnight and hooked to the charger. By morning the battery was full up, but the signal strength meter was flatlined. Being a good boy I decided to wait out the 24 hours, even though there was surely something wrong with the phone. (Our phone is the same model and when they were side by side, our signal strength meter was full to the top while the new one showed nothing.)

Friday evening I called the support phone number and explained that my phone was not working. She could see on her computer that I had activated it, but told me it hadn’t been 24 hours. When I said sure it has, her response was not 24 business hours. Huh? “What’s a business hour?” I ask. There are 8 business hours in a day she replied, so according to them I had only been waiting for my phone to start working for 8 hours. WTF? Knowing what the answer would be before I asked, I said, “I suppose Saturday and Sunday don’t count?” “Right,” she said. I tried to explain about the lack of signal strength so there was zero possibility that my phone would be receiving any kind of power up codes, she would have none of it. When I put on my most exasperated voice and said, “I’d like to say thank you..” Before I could finish with, “But I can’t.” She promptly replied, “You’re welcome. Have a nice day and thank you for calling Tracfone.”

Sixteen business hours later – now it is this past Tuesday evening. I call the support phone and get a recording saying that I should try back in 48 to 72 hours due to problems associated with Hurricane Wilma. Sheesh. I’m calling them tomorrow.

If you are a regular reader here you know that the one show left on TV that I make a point of watching is The West Wing (it probably should have it’s own category.) But the last couple of Sunday’s I just haven’t experienced that same magic. I’m thinking it is this whole campaign thing, I really enjoy the White House stuff a whole lot better. It was OK when a couple seasons ago Bartlet was running for re-election, because we still got a healthy dose of, well, the West Wing goings on. I am beginning to think, as happens with most TV shows and me, I lose interest. I want the same old comfortable stuff and they move on or I tire of the same old stuff they are giving me and I want them to move on. Oh, well, there are always the repeats on Bravo.

Tried this evening to get the gravatars back. It worked fine in MT, but I couldn’t get the WordPress plugin to work right for me. I tried several different parameters for the plugin, but it wouldn’t work consistently, so I pulled it from the comments area.

They have this rating system so that some people can use more provocative images if they want and bloggers can choose not to show them. First I left any rating out of the plugin and it would show one person’s image but not another’s. So I cut and pasted the example into my template with it’s “R” parameter and the gravatars shown would change. Then I plugged in “X” and different ones would show. Keep in mind that everyone of the gravatars used by my comment posters are innocuous at best. Making matters worse was when I tried jockeying the size while keeping the rating the same, different ones would show than with just the rating. One combination caused no gravatars to show. At one point I would get a brief wink of the image before the square would turn black…

Sorry commenters, but you will just have to live with seeing your name there.