Tag Archives: cell phone

It’s better than standing in line…

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Once upon a time I was among the first in line to upgrade each year when the new iPhone was released. That’s back when each new release was a giant leap forward in the state of the art. Now that the market segment for smart phones is well and truly mature, advances are, at best, iterative. I honestly couldn’t tell you the last surprising or novel capability Apple added. The iPhone as a platform is polished, unsurprising, and in the finest traditions of Apple, “just works” for 99.999% of anything I need a cell phone to do. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’m not using anything but the smallest percentage of the device’s native capability. Sitting here the back half of my 40s, I’m grudgingly learning to accept that most “new and improved” technology isn’t targeted directly at me anymore.

In any case, over the years I have fallen off the “as soon as possible replacement” cycle. Now I’m about a month behind in bringing the latest and greatest tech home with me. Some of that is driven by the terms of the iPhone replacement program – essentially a lease agreement by Apple has adopted me as a guaranteed monthly revenue stream in exchange for sending me their newest kit every 12 months. It’s a good deal for them from a business perspective and it continues to scratch my itch for wanting new electronic toys on a regular basis.

I’m sure I’m leaving money on the table. In the old days I was able to sell my old phones not quite at cost, but still recouping a large percentage of what I spent originally. Apple, of course, has made it easy. When I’m due for an upgrade, they send me an email, I click on a few buttons, and two boxes arrive on my porch – one empty, to send in my old phone and the other chock full of new iPhone.

In any case, I’ve signed up for another year of throwing a monthly iPhone subscription fee at Apple and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my fresh new Pro Max 16.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. New iPhone season. Yes, it’s new iPhone season. Once upon a time that would have filled my heart with excitement. I’d have even gotten up far earlier than normal to schlep over to my nearest Apple Store for the chance to buy their new wonder. For the last three or four years, though, I’ve basically just been leasing my phone from Apple. I’m about two weeks away from my scheduled upgrade window – and sure, I’ll do it – but the thrill is gone. It’s hard not to see the miniature computer in my pocket as just another electronic commodity, with this year’s having marginally better cameras, marginally more speed, and marginally improved battery life. I’m sure I’ll be duly impressed to have a freshly upgraded bit of kit once it’s in my hands, of course. Even so, no matter how many emails they send me offering to let me swap out early for the low, low price of $60, I’m in no great rush.

2. Consistency. If I have to take a stupid walk for my dumb health, I want to get it knocked out as early in the day as possible. For the last bunch of months, that’s meant schlepping out just at the beginning of dawn’s early light and often getting home before the sun was even properly up. Now that autumn is here, though, to stay on schedule, I’m leaving the house and getting most of the walk done before the promise of a rising sun has even turned the horizon gray. One of the many things I’ve noticed while most of the rest of the world sleeps is how many people illuminate their houses with mismatched exterior lighting.  Some houses are consistent, but the number that mix harsh blue, soft white, and the occasional other colored hue surprises me. I’m not a designer by any stretch, but from where I’m walking, the mash up of mixed color “temperature” scattered across the front of the average house looks awful. It probably shouldn’t annoy me, but it does.

3. Physical therapy. I’ve been in physical therapy several times over the last ten years, but this morning reminded me that there’s one aspect of the experience I can never seem to get over… that would be the general indignity of being laid out, bent, twisted, folded, spindled, and mutilated right there with seven or eight other people getting the same treatment for their own maladies. It feels like there should, somehow, be a more discrete or dignified way of getting treated. I know I’m not looking around or trying to take in a show during these sessions, but the whole experience leaves me feeling intensely vulnerable and that’s just unpleasant.

Just in case…

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I realized today, and not for the first time, what the hardest part of my job really is. It’s not, as you may think, that it involves holding a large number of often conflicting ideas in my head simultaneously. It’s not that basic day to day operations can be derailed at the whim of any number of layers of management and supervision. It’s not even that the good idea fairy seems to take great joy in shitting all over my head at every opportunity.

Truly the hardest part of this job is that the bathroom is on the wrong side of the secure door – which means any time you have to take a crap, you can’t doom scroll Twitter, swipe through Tinder, or ponder your Facebook friends list. In a world where newspapers aren’t a thing anymore, it as often as not means you’re stuck looking at four blank walls until boredom sets in. That’s no way to expect a civilized person to take a comfort break.

I usually explain the pile of magazines on my desk by noting how unreliable the network is and wanting something close at hand to while away the time while we don’t have connectivity. But you and I both know why I make sure my magazine stash is really always topped off… just in case.

Twenty percent…

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There’s a recent survey that shows 20% of those Americans polled believe the COVID-19 vaccine is being used to imbed a tracking chip in all who receive it. The “good” news is that only 5% said it was “definitely” true while 15% said it was only “probably” true. 

Twenty percent of our fellow Americans believe something that is patently absurd. That’s one in five people – a number that feels like it almost guarantees that we all know someone or possibly many people who are part of the 20%. Some of them may even be reading this blog right now.

I’m never entirely sure what bit of the brain has to be badly wired to convince people to buy into some of the more wild-assed conspiracy theories. What on earth would possess someone to think that the government (or new world order for that matter), would bother with something so pedestrian as implanting a chip… when we’ve pretty much all long ago agreed to carry one of the most advanced tracking devices in history in our pocket all day every day.

This 20% are among us, though. They’re our politicians, our teachers, our religious leaders, our lawyers, our firefighters, and pretty much anyone else you can imagine. That’s the thought that horrifies me far more than the idea of any kind of chip the big, bad virologists might have slipped me. 

Personal growth or something…

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I’ve got two months left on my current iPhone Upgrade Program replacement cycle. I could buy my way out of those last two months for about $60 and sign up Friday morning for a spanking new iPhone 11 in hopes of getting it on launch day. It’s tempting… and there was a time it would have been an absolute no brainer. I’d have been one of the first 50 through the door on release day to make sure I got the one I wanted.

The days of me wanting anything badly enough to stand in line in the middle of the night, though, seem to be well over. I still like new and shiny, but I prefer to acquire it during normal business hours. I guess you could call that personal growth or something.

Of course it’s not so much growth that’s going to keep me from walking in to the local Apple Store sometime around the end of October and swapping out the 10 for the 11… and another year of renting the latest iPhone. Even if all they did was make the camera even better, it’s worth the price of admission as far as I’m concerned. Even if it’s not also worth the $60 premium to buy my way into the upgrade on release weekend.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The 80/20 rule. The reward for good work is more work. The reward for bad work is less work. Other than a sense of personal satisfaction of doing a job well, there’s damned little incentive to do top notch work in an environment that doesn’t really reward anything above the baseline or punish anything below the baseline. Things just slide along while everyone hopes equilibrium is maintained and no one makes too many waves. Meanwhile we’ll just keep throwing stuff at those that can instead of demanding performance from those who should.

2. Puppy energy. Folding a new dog into the routine is has been challenging – probably in large part because the resident dog is old and happy to spend most of her day sleeping. By contrast, the now 7-month old pup, is still full of teenaged asshole dog energy and requires constant oversight. It’s no so bad on the days when I’m home with ample time to wear his fuzzy little ass, but God help us on the days when I’m working and he gets to rest up. We were all a decade younger the last time there was a puppy in the house. I don’t remember being better rested at 30 than I am at 40, but maybe I was. Who knows. Maybe I was even energetic myself way back when. Somehow I doubt that. Jorah is going to be a fantastic dog… just as soon as I get him through the stage where he’s a total pain in the ass.

3. The FCC. The FCC has spent decades chasing “crude and rude” broadcasters across the airwaves – levying fines and trying to make sure all the poor sensitive souls don’t accidentally get offended by something. If the honorable commissioners of the FCC want to do something even remotely beneficial to actual people, they’d dragoon the Special Operations Command into hunting down and killingly the people responsible for spam and scam cell phone calls and text messages. Slap a bounty on the scammers heads and pay out dead or alive for every one drug across the threshold of their glass and steal headquarters building lobby. That’s the kind of proactive service I want to see them providing instead of page after page of tips on how to not get scammed.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Joy theft. If I’m bluntly honest, I’ll tell you that I spend all day at work wanting to get home and lose myself in a book. By the time I’m home, dinner is made and cleaned up, and I’ve tended the creatures who share my roof, I’m so bleary eyed and tired that getting through a paragraph without my mind wandering is hard. Three nights out of five I can’t seem to focus on the words long enough for it to even be enjoyable. It’s just one more way that paying bills and being responsible conspire to suck all the real joy out of life.

2. Signals over the air. All I want to do in the few minutes between when I pull into the parking lot and when I have to be at my desk is get my morning Twitter update and find some funny, funny memes. Apparently that is too much to ask because for the last two weeks the parking lot has been a large dead zone. I don’t know if it’s my phone, Verizon, or just the Department of the Army trying to suck even a brief flicker of fun out of the surrounding air, but for whatever reason there’s nothing doing on my phone for those ten or fifteen minutes. If you think a few minutes of boredom and mindlessly staring out the windshield is enough to break my spirit and get me to my desk a few minutes earlier than I have to be there, well, it’s like you don’t know me at all.

3. Mushroom status. When grown in a farm setting, many mushrooms are simply left alone in a dark room and fed a steady diet of shit. I’m sure it happens in every organization of more than one person, but this great green machine of ours seems to have honed leaving people out of the loop to a fine art. It’s always exciting to come to the office and find an email from someone working in another organization letting you know that “your boss from high on Olympus said ‘X’ is going to happen.” It’s when you, as the person nominally responsible for “X,” have the exciting opportunity to let that individual know that no one in your own organization has bothered to tell you a fucking thing and thank them for the heads up before launching out on a paper chase to sus out how much time you may or may not have wasted depending on the veracity of your informant’s information.

Almost a fiasco…

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Saturday morning I discovered that my local Apple Store had in stock availability of their new flagship, iPhone X. I wouldn’t usually venture anywhere near a mall two days after Thanksgiving, but the desire for new and shiny tech got the better of me. Stunningly, I arrived five minutes after the mall opened and parked within 20 yards of the door. It seems that their “holiday hours” are poorly advertised and almost no one realized they were opening an hour early. Fine by me.

I was an AT&T cellular customer since back in the mists of time when they were known as Cingular. I was generally a satisfied customer, too – until I moved to Fortress Jeff, which is located in a black hole of their coverage map. I could make and receive calls over wifi, but when wifi was down, my cell was pretty much an expensive paperweight. Unacceptable. With this change of phone, I wanted to make the jump to Verizon, who neighbors promised had at least a bar or two of coverage even the local power and cable is out. It happens more often than you’d imagine out here at the end of the transmission line.

Without going into details, I’ll just say that AT&T, Verizon, and Apple corporate policies all threw up roadblocks to converting from the Apple Upgrade Program under AT&T to the same program under Verizon. The guy I was working with, though, was an absolute bulldog and took the problems first to the floor manager, who was as confounded as we were. The floor manager then elevated the issues through two layers of management “in the back.” Finally they decided there was actually no way to get from Point A to Point B using existing policy and procedures. That’s they point where one of them decided “we’re going to break the rules” to make the sale.

I can’t say for sure if any rules were broken, but if the number of Apple employees standing around looking concerned while they fiddled with various entries on their tablet is any sign, they were certainly doing something unusual. In the end it took six people and almost an hour to make the sale.

It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t seamless, but in the end I walked away with exactly what I wanted. I appreciate that level of tenacity when the easy answer was “we can’t.” I appreciate it even more when I’ve got two bars of service when the wifi’s off. Well done, Apple. It’s a wonderful lesson for other business out there that customer services really, truly doesn’t have to suck.

Lessons on a snowy day…

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Yesterday wasn’t the first snowy day I’ve had here on the homestead. Compared to last winter’s big storm, this one hardly rated a blip, except for the part where the last half of the storm turned to ice. It’s pretty to look at, makes for some interesting watching the dogs try to find traction, and cuts down trees and utility poles like nobody’s business. It’s that last bit that served to set the stage for the most important of the day’s lessons.

I’ve always known my AT&T wireless signal at home was spotty at best. Since I don’t make all that often, this fact was largely hidden by my home Wi-Fi picking up the slack for data purposes. It’s a system that works well enough under normal operating conditions. With Comcast having gone MIA due to any number of local lines being down, operating conditions yesterday were less than ideal. By “less than,” I mean that my fancy new iPhone was utterly and completely useless as a means of communicating for almost the entire duration of the cable outage.

Also learned yesterday was the fact that every penny I spent installing and maintaining my generator was money well spent. Twenty seconds after the lines came down, it roared to life and kept the furnace blower blowing, the well and sump pumps pumping, the dryer drying, and the lights lit. I cooked a normal dinner and settled in to watch The Hunt for Red October and then Master and Commander… while occasionally seeing candles dot the windows of the house across the street. It kept right on chugging through 18 hours without a moment’s complaint. With that I am well satisfied.

Aside from a few other minor details, yesterday’s experience was one up and one down. Over the next few weeks, I know I need to beef up my communications capability. That’s good info to have before I find myself in a position of really needing it. Once the ice melts off and I get a decent day, I also owe the generator an oil change and a pat on the proverbial head.

Seven Plus…

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Since my order on launch day didn’t entitle me to a “first day of availability” delivery of the iPhone 7 Plus, I exercised one of my lesser developed qualities and sat patiently until it was available for walk in sales. If I can’t get my hands on it right out of the gate, having it delivered to the house weeks later and then getting hit with the additional 6% State of Maryland premium was mostly a case on injury and insult. I didn’t anticipate that was going to take three months, but at long last my patience has been rewarded with a shiny new toy from the wizards in Cupertino (picked up tax free thanks to the fine people of Delaware).

I don’t have any assessment of it yet and in any case anything I find will have already been covered to death by the tech world. Suffice to say that it is small and thiner and from an initial test the camera is probably better than any stand alone camera I ever owned. I’m looking forward to taking this little number out for a test drive… just as soon as all the apps finish downloading.