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March 9, 2004

I'm an Ungrateful Jerk

And I love my new cell phone.

We'd been talking about getting me a new cell phone plan that I would share with Noel, because sometimes my bill is huge and sometimes it is merely large, owning to my being on some ridiculous "Loyal Starter" plan created when PacBell Wireless became Cingular (which has now become AT&T, I guess). This "Loyal Starter" plan has like 20 minutes included each month, so I guess if you were loyal you get to get shafted. But figuring out what we wanted was complex, and it had to mesh with what Noel could expense for work, so we put it off and put it off, and spent a lot of time talking about what features we needed and wanted to use, and what sort of phones we wanted (I wanted a camera phone and the ability to send text messages), and it seemed like nothing was going to get accomplished.

Then suddenly Noel got into gear on it, and called and set up the account and suddenly we had two fine new phones, Nokia 6820 camera phones that flip out to have a full QWERTY keyboard, with e-mail and text messages built in so we can contact each other voicelessly (useful when I'm at school and just want to get a quick piece of information to Noel, rather than have to have a conversation). He also got us new phone numbers, as my old cell number was in 408, and his was in 415, and we wanted to both be in 510 (which is the area code where we live). I asked him to get me a cool number, because I have been holding on to my old phone for years because it has an easy number to remember.

Noel's idea of a "cool" number and mine apparently do not intersect in many places. Where I think a cool number is one that is numerically interesting, and therefore easy to remember (like, say, pi, or a repeat), his idea was "a number that spells something." So he came home with two numbers that spelled something, not anything interesting, though, and therefore were a jumble of numbers that are hard to remember. And most of the time, when you give somebody your number, you want them to remember it.

I tried, for a whole day, to like my new number, but it wasn't working. So rather than make me suck it up and deal, even though I'd made him do all the work to get the plan and the phones in the first place, Noel called AT&T (our new provider) and spent nearly an hour on the phone getting me a cool new number that is a palindrome. (Kudos to Ken at AT&T, too, who was patient and helpful and didn't once yell at Noel that he's crazy and he should just slap his wife and tell her to like the number he got her the first time round.)

So now I have a shiny new camera phone that I have to learn how to use. The only thing that is sad is that it does not have my favourite game from the old phone (Memory). But owing to the screen on the old phone having gone all haywire almost a year ago, and completely given up the ghost four months ago, I'd already had to wean myself off playing it, anyway. And the new phone does have some new games which I might try out, or possibly there's a version of memory for this phone online. Plus it has a calendar, which should be mighty useful in helping me get over my ability to forget that I was supposed to be somewhere.

And I'm excited about the camera, which I have already used to take a picture of my obliging usual model. Now all I have to do is get my script to automatically take e-mail and turn it into photoblog posts to actually run, and I'll be a happy person. Or an even happier person. Did I mention that Noel got me a phone number that is a palindrome?

Posted by ayse on 03/09/04 at 11:58 PM

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March 9, 2004

I'm an Ungrateful Jerk