muckefuck | My carrier has hung up on *me*!

My carrier has hung up on me!

Latest annoyance: After five years with them, my phone company has gotten tired of being superior to the local provider I dumped them for and has decided to jack up their fees by 261%. I won't go through how difficult it's been to extract information from them, I'll just say that I'm now shopping around for a replacement--which might mean giving up my landline, since AT&T is pulling out of local service in my area and I still haven't forgiven SBC for all those years of dicking me around. Being a consumer would be so much easier if I simply had no pride.

But I'm sick of bitching about how hard it is to be a well-off, homeowning capitalist. Forthwith: My promised review of last weekend--just in time for the next!

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P. and his wife have switched to a broadband phone (Vonage, I think), and they're VERY happy with it. H. and I plan to do the same within the next month or so.

One thing that concerns me about broadband and cell-phone only options is that they lack robustness in an emergency. The wireline system keeps working in blackouts and doesn't have the same tendency to get immediately overloaded in the event of a high-traffic disaster. (They also work better for giving 911 location details-- the mobile E911 system is being steadily improved, but it's not comparable to the wired system everywhere yet.) And my cable and cable modem have been out many more times in the last few years than my phone service ever has. (I don't remember the last time I had a phone outage, actually.)

I dislike paying tribute to SBC every month, and pray daily not to need help from their customer service department. (And I remember a long day spent in an empty apartment in the pre-cell phone age, waiting for phone installers who never came.) But memories of being unable to reach my parents reliably when they were in NYC on 9/11 make me very leery about cutting that particular cord.

I'm moving to Vonage, m'self. I had some nastiness from Verizon over the summer and I decided I just didn't need them anymore. First I made the ISP transition from DSL to cable, and that has been running smoothly. Next month I'll transition to the VoIP and will kiss James Earl Jones goodbye.

I will not do the cellphone thing. I'm overconnected with the 'net as it is, and I don't want to be a cellphone slave.

monshu feels the same way about cell phones. I tease him about it from time to time, but he really doesn't want to be more plugged in than he already is.

What about PLUGGED IN TO YOU?

Like I said...

Of course it also helps that the cellphone feng shui gods do not shine on my apartment. I live in a railroad apartment that runs parallel to an elevated subway line as well as a major artery, and all the local antennae are pointed at the train and the road. There is reception in only one corner of the front bedroom, and then only if the listener is tall enough to bend over the rubber tree in the window. Otherwise no Sprint, no Verizon, no Catherine Zeta Jones.

I will not do the cellphone thing. I'm overconnected with the 'net as it is, and I don't want to be a cellphone slave.

Obviously you know yourself and how you would relate to a phone. But cell phones can be turned off, as can ringers, caller-ID (all but universal on cell phones, I think) can be consulted before deciding whether to answer, and you can let a call go to voice mail and then decide whether and when to call back. (I don't grant that being near a phone means I'm obligated to answer it in the first place, but even for callers who don't accept that, cell phone reception is variable enough to constitute plausible deniability.) I certainly know people who are slaves to their phones, but through choice (or professional obligation) rather than due to any inherent necessity.

But cell phones can be turned off

Oh no, they can't. No. really. Trust me, schatzi.

My father bought a cell phone last year which he keeps turned off. "I bought it so I could make calls," he explains, "not so people could call me."

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