2020 Life Logs, Day 199: Waste of a Beautiful Summer Day
Date: Saturday, July 18, 2020
Weather: Sunny and Hot; High 84, Low 67 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Technology is great until it isn’t. Here’s the long story. My phone dropped out of my back pocket Thursday a week ago when I was in the Menauhant Beach parking lot. I was packing the back of my car after an afternoon at the beach when my phone plopped face down on one little piece of gravel in the dirt parking area. That’s all it took to make my screen look like an intricate spider web. The phone was still usable, but I knew I had to get the screen replaced. Without checking, the next day I called the Cellfone Fixer and said I needed a new screen for a Samsung J8. I was sure that was what I had bought. The woman who answered the phone said that they didn’t have a J8 in stock and since it was a Friday, it would be in on Monday or Tuesday. She would call. But she didn’t. This week flew by and yesterday I called to see if the screen was in. Yes. I was instructed to bring the phone in anytime time and 40 minutes later, it would be fixed. So today around noon I headed to the Cellfone Fixer in Mashpee, about a ten minute drive. When I got there, the guy who does the fixing took a look and told me my phone was not an J8 as I had told them. So much for being sure and not checking. He said it was an S8 and he didn’t have any of those screens in stock. Ugh. But he had a slightly used S8 that he assured me was just fine and he could take the mother board out of my phone, put it in the new phone, and I would be all set. Since I didn’t want to spend any more time on this, I agreed. While I was waiting, I walked down the street in the Mashpee Commons to the little organic grocery store I have been using since the early days of the coronavirus. I can always order from Rory’s and have things delivered on the same day. But since it was just down the street, I went in today and picked up a few items. When I returned to check on my phone, the phone still wasn’t ready. So I waited another 10 minutes in the car. Finally, it was done. It looked like everything was fine, so I drove home. Next on my ‘to do’ list was to check on the delivery of the planters that I ordered for Heather and Jed’s deck on May 9th. Finally, on July 1, I got a message from UPS that said the packages had been labeled. But there has not been an update since then. This afternoon, I tried a back and forth messaging ‘conversation’ on my computer with UPS and got nowhere, so I decided to call. That’s when I got a message telling me I had no mobile network connection. Sure enough, when I looked closely at my home screen, it showed no bars. I tried turning the phone off and on and checked the settings, but I got nowhwere. So now I needed to call AT&T. But, of course, I got another ‘no mobile network’ message. I turned on my computer and tried to call via Skype. That worked and I got a real person almost immediately who couldn’t help me. She had to transfer me to technical support and I had to wait about 30 minutes to get someone who asked me if the person who worked on my phone replaced the SIM card. I had no idea. She gave me instructions on how to pop open the door to the SIM card on my phone, but the instructions didn’t work. She explained that I was going to have to call the person who worked on it, ask him, and then call back and go through the waiting time again. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I used Skype to call the Cellfone Fixer. No answer and a nice little message that said they have a busy little shop and in order to talk to someone, I would need to come in. I won’t say what I thought about that message, but I got back in the car and drove back to Mashpee. The ‘fixer’ listened to my story, opened the back of the phone, and discovered that evidently in Samsung phones you also have to transfer the mother board plus the mechanism that holds the SIM card. The fix was fairly quick and the phone does work fine now. But what a waster of a beautiful afternoon.
Unfortunately, the day was almost over by the time I got home and I just couldn’t face trying to battle with UPS over where in the world the deck planters are, so that will have to wait until Monday morning. Instead, I headed outside to remove some of the briars that I obviously missed in the spring when I worked on prickly briar removal. Everyday when I take Shadow for a little walk in the woods by the cottage, I get caught by these prickly vines. I made some progress, did some watering in areas not yet covered by the drip irrigation system, and called it a day. In between all of this, Heather and gang stopped by on their way to a late day stop at the beach. All of the beach equipment like boogie boards and buckets and shovels are in my car, so they stopped to get that. Then Peter Baranowski stopped by to share the bounty of clams he got this afternoon. It was way more than I could eat, so I, in turn, sent a text to Heather and said I’d drive to the beach when they were ready to go home and share some of the clams with them. The clams saved an otherwise wasted day. Thank you, Peter!
