At the Cell Phone Store

We have two cell phones, and two different service providers. Well, we did until this week. Now we have two phones and one service.

We originally signed up with Alltel back around 2000, and then, about a year ago, they were changed over to Verizon. We had been pleased with Alltel through the years, but Verizon got worse and worse through the last several months.

Our Verizon bill kept going up and up. According to our bills, this was due to using more minutes. I thought maybe this was due to us living with my mother-in-law, and not having our own land line. We must have been using our cell phones more. But after a while, I started doubting the numbers shown in the monthly bill.

And then once we got in our new house, and the latest bill came in — at 3 times our plan base cost — I was sure Verizon was screwing us. So I started shopping around, starting with our other service provider, AT&T.

The store manager at the nearby AT&T shop offered us a fantastic deal: two lines for just $10 more than we were already paying for one line. I got the deal in writing, and we compared it with other options. A few days later, we went in and signed up with AT&T.

Before leaving the house with our boys in tow, we let them pick out several toys to bring. We told them what we were going to be doing, and that they would need to sit over in the corner of the store and play quietly for a few minutes. They brought Bakugan balls and cards, and Star Wars Legos figures.

Fortunately, the store was empty of other customers. Our boys sat down in a corner of the store, and apparently had a great time while their mom and dad talked business with the store manager.

Unfortunately, what we expected to maybe last 15 minutes turned out to be very nearly 60 minutes.

Verizon is some dumb shits. A good chunk of our time was trying to get our old number transferred to our new service. The AT&T store manager had two people from Verizon on the phone, trying to get everything worked out. The Verizon people couldn’t find our account in their system. They couldn’t find our phone number in a database search.

Our cell phone service company couldn’t find our phone number in their freakin’ computers! How screwed up is a company’s database if they can’t find the phone number they set up and provided and charge us for? Makes me think about those questionable bills we’d gotten lately.

At last, they found our account in their system. And we got the old number transferred to our new service.

During the last 10 minutes or so of this ordeal, our boys started getting a bit antsy. They’d been good and mostly quiet for about 40 minutes sitting in the small store, playing with their toys. But then they were getting tired, bored, and fidgety. (No other customers had come in the store since we got there, so it was just us and the store manager this whole time.)

At one point they started going around picking up some of the display phones around the store. We asked the store manager if it was alright if they looked at the phones, and she said they were all just display models — “It’s fine. They can’t hurt anything,” she said.

We instructed the boys to not have more than one phone at a time, and we kept an eye on them to make sure they were playing gently. Though they were excited by the gadgets, they did stay calm and gentle.

Calfgrit5 came over to us one time with a slider phone open, saying, “This looks like a DS.”

I don’t know where he has ever heard of a Nintendo DS, much less actually seen one.

A few minutes later, he had another phone up to his ear, pretending to talk to someone on the other end. “Hey, how are you doing? . . . Everything’s good here. . . . Really? Oh my gosh! . . .” He carried on this conversation for a couple minutes. This was totally adorable, but I would love to know who he was supposedly talking to. “OK, bye,” he said, and he closed the phone.

Shortly after, we had completed our business with the store. We directed the boys in collecting up their toys scattered about the corner of the store, and then we left with a new cell phone and a new service plan.

Immediately, Calfgrit9 wanted to know if he could have our old phone. He was disappointed when we explained that it didn’t have any service connected with it. He actually thought we might give him, a 3rd grader, his own cell phone.

“Who would you even call?” we asked him. “None of your friends have a cell phone.”

“I’d send text messages,” he answered.

“Who would you text?”

“You. And Nana. And Granddaddy.”

That’s really sweet. But still. “When you get old enough to need a cell phone, we’ll see about it.”

“Okay,” he said.

Now, at what age does a kid need a cell phone in the 21st century?

Bullgrit