My new cell phone. Photo: Mitch Teich
April 30, 2023 –
I’m going to tell you something that will surprise you, even shock you. You may even think I’m lying, or even telling a bold-faced lie. Or possibly a lie in italics.
I like the guys at my local cell phone store.
I know what you’re thinking, or maybe exclaiming out loud, startling your spouse, who was calmly sitting there drinking coffee until your outburst and now you need the paper towels to clean up the spilled coffee. In terms of honesty and reliability, believe that the staff at mobile phone stores are among the best used car salesmen and advertising writers for mattress companies. Do you believe that cell phone companies design their contracts expressly for the purpose of confusing ordinary people so much that they agree to buy a phone for $1,400, spread over 84 monthly payments of $21, not including trade-in, tax, title, license, and Some options sold separately.
But the guys at my local cell phone store seem to have adopted a philosophy of speaking in English and possibly (?) having my best interest at heart. Maybe it’s a North Country thing, but I’m not telling you which store it’s from, in case these guys really are unique, because the cell phone company might fire them for being too comprehensible.
Anyway, I like these guys, which is good, because I’ve seen a lot of them in the last few months. I’ve been using cell phones since the days when they came in big bags and my little radio station in Iowa had one and we had to shut it down and also drive up a hill outside of town to get a signal and In fact. use it I had one of the first cell phone cameras, which you actually had to attach to the bottom of the phone when you wanted to use it, and then I took a grainy, low-resolution photo that looked like the inside of a refrigerator with the door is closed.
But until recently, I had never successfully cracked a phone.
Until that weekend – remember that weekend – it was 26 below outside, and I was with my family in Lake Placid, taking lots of very cold photos, which often required me to pull my phone out of my pocket with nonsense One of those times, the phone decided that 26 below was really too arctic to take photos, and one of the lenses (yes, I have a phone with five lenses) cracked from the cold, as a result of touching dangerously a zipper .
We’ll skip the part where I write about the independent warranty company and their policy that has a $29 co-pay if the screen breaks and a $219 co-pay for the camera lens, and just note that in a couple of days i got a new phone. , and some custom lens protectors. And within a week, the lens protectors were on, I had applied something called a “liquid screen protector” to the front of the phone and a rugged case to the back.
All told, the phone now weighed about 16 pounds, just the right amount of weight to fly out of my jacket pocket while the jacket sat on my lap at my son’s band concert and landed on the metal bleachers at about 16 inches below, where… Liquid screen protector be damned – the screen suffered a fatal crack.
“Weren’t you here?” asked my friend at the cell phone store. But she was patient and walked me through the claim process again (this was covered by the $29 copay) and I was about to send me my way.
But not before looking through the shop window where my Volkswagen was parked. “Hey,” he asked. “How did you hit your car?”
We’ll skip that part too.
