Why I Keep My Landline

We are not a smartphone family.  My husband has his Crackberry™ through work.  I don't feel the need to carry the internet in my purse and frankly, didn't want to spend the money on it for my kids either.  My oldest bought one for herself immediately upon graduation from college and I was just happy to get her off our plan. On a side note, have you heard of married children who are still on their parents' phone plans?  I have!  I'm all about saving money, but good grief, cut the damn cord already!

Anyhoooo..........our son is leaving in less than two weeks for college and my husband felt as though a person majoring in engineering ought to have a smartphone. From looking into various plans, it was going to be cheaper for him to not be on our family plan, only because you are sort of forced to have the whole family be on a data plan if you go that route. He chose a phone from another carrier and we got it ordered and it arrived.

And I let it sit here for weeks...........our son was at a conference out of town for one week, and then, I got busy.  When questioned by my spouse, I told him I needed to activate the phone when a)our son was going to be home for the whole day and not need to take a phone with him and b)I'd need an entire day to devote to activation.

I'm known as the 'Big Exaggerator' of the family.  Well, we'd soon see about that!

At noon last Thursday, I went on my computer to do an online activation (because the phone box claimed that was the easy way). Filled out all the DEC number stuff, etc. and got to the part about porting your current phone number.  It refused to let me use the number I typed in and was prompting me to pick a random number. I was forced to call the 800 number because who wants to get a new phone number if it's not necessary?  I won't go into detail, I'll just say it was a 90 minute call to simply activate the phone.  Lots of problems, including I was not able to call MY own cell phone from this new smartphone. The person I was dealing with just chalked that up to my not being familiar with this new phone.

I hang up the landline that I was using for all of this, give my son his new phone, and tell him to figure it all out and send me a text to see if it was working for him.  After numerous attempts to send me OR his sister a text and getting 'Invalid number' each time, I went to go send him a text and found I couldn't do it either.  I then tried to call my husband's cell phone from my cell phone.  Not working.  I called him on the landline at his work number and asked if he could make a call or text from his cell. Nope.  I went online to my cell phone carrier account to see what was up.  Account not found!!!!

I'm now calling my cell phone carrier from the landline to tell them that I had one of our four cell phones ported to a new carrier, but now NONE of our three remaining phones work.  The person from India had never heard of this, but she was happy to transfer me to a native English speaker, who tried various remedies for me while I was on hold.  Meanwhile, after having already been on the phone over an hour beforehand, my cordless battery ran out and I had to switch to the other cordless.  They then switched me to another person in their tech dept.  Along the way, I heard rehearsed apology after apology. I finally said they didn't need to apologize as they weren't the ones who had ported all our numbers to unknown phones in cyberspace.

Finally, the tech guy said that it was going to take too long for them to resolve this with me on hold, so he asked for my landline number.  Hours later, he did call me back and we went through manually activating each phone.  I had to write down all the instructions so I could phone my husband later, since his phone was at work with him.  Through all of this, I managed to use up the battery in my other cordless phone and was on the wall phone in our laundry room that the previous
owners kindly left behind.  Picture me using a wall phone, while trying to open the back case of two cell phones, remove the batteries, put them back in, and type in a jumble of letters and numbers that someone is reading to me on the phone.

At 5 pm, we were back in business.

And this is why I keep my landline and reserve an entire day for activating a phone.

**Ron, wherever you are lost without internet right now, I dedicate this post to you!