2005-07-02 - 12:18 a.m.
Today is July 1, and it starts what will basically be a huge amount of time off. Thanks to the school�s very generous vacation policy, my vacation plus unused personal days plus Fridays off in the summer plus the weekends plus the Fourth of July equals �I don�t have to go to work for the entire month of July!�
That�s not 100% true. There was some essential work that I didn�t have time to complete (so what else is new), so I brought it home and e-mailed to myself here all the databases I will need so that I ought to be able to simply do that work here, at home, if I can make myself get around to it. Well, I just have to, so I better do it soon so that I won�t have it hanging over my head. Without distractions, it shouldn�t take more than half a day once I actually make myself sit down and do it.
Also, my Notary Public commission expires in July and renewing it not only takes a state examination, but also a required six-hour course. Actually, I�m thankful for the course, I�d probably want to take it again anyway. What with all the work I�ve had to do this past year, I think brain rot has set in for just about anything else. What does a Notary do, again?
My favorite thing about being a Notary Public is having the optional embossing seal�I don�t mean the self-inking stamp, but the round gizmo that squeezes your seal into various sheets of paper. Every time I use it instead of the self-inking stamp, I want to say �Oh, is THIS what this is for? I�ve been using it to crack nuts.� But I guarantee not a soul would understand what I was talking about, but it�s my little reference back to Mark Twain�s The Prince and the Pauper, which was one of my favorite stories growing up. In the climactic scene in which the chancellors in the palace see the two identical-looking boys standing together and can�t believe that the Prince is really the Prince, it was the Prince�s knowledge of the location of the Royal Seal that proved his identity. �Oh, is that the Royal Seal?� exclaimed the Pauper. �I used it to crack nuts!� Of course, that seal had to be something heavy and most likely used on sealing wax, but my Notary seal descended from that royal root, and I am rather pleased to have one.
You see, when I was a boy growing up, in my mind, I was the hidden Prince, just waiting for some perceptive person to finally recognize who I really was, but I was also the Pauper, because his name was Tom, too (Tom Canty). And then as I got older, I fantasized myself as being a heroic Miles Hendon type, the nobleman who protected the Prince even though he didn�t believe that the boy was a prince, he just thought he was a precocious but crazy homeless boy who needed his help. But in this day and age, there can�t be any more Miles Hendons without frigid, man-hating feminist harpies declaring such a man to be a child molestor. The same thing would happen to Hagrid, who would be arrested before he managed to get Harry Potter halfway to Hogwarts. Nowadays, boys are left to their own devices concerning growing up (or being ushered back to their true identity), unless they happen to have had the good fortune of having a wonderful father (as I did�even though he wasn�t a king, which put the kybosh on my being a prince). Yeah yeah yeah, I know, men are such out of control sexual monsters that whomever they choose to hang around with must be their chosen sex object. Which just goes to show that most men must really be gay, and are particularly turned on by beer-drinking, cigar-smoking poker players.
Anyway, my required six-hour Notary Public training and exam day (on July 6th) will, technically, be a work day, since I do this for the school, but I won�t need to go to the school in July.
The course and exam will be held in San Diego. All the ones scheduled to be in Los Angeles either conflict with my cruise or won�t be until the last few days in July, so I decided to sign up for San Diego and make a fun little trip out of it by going down early the day before and staying in a motel that night.
However, I hadn�t gotten this vacation off like I had planned. Instead of completing my work today like I should have, I spent the entire day going over various cell phone companies, plans, and phones. I was obsessed by this task, because I got an irritating letter from Cingular last night when I got home from work. Several months ago, Cingular bought out AT&T, who was my cell phone company, and ever since they�ve been Cortez and the invading army of Conquistadors, treating us former AT&T customers like the Aztecs, raping and pillaging and spreading smallpox everywhere they go.
I never really wanted a cell phone except for emergencies or the occasional convenient use, and all the normal calling plans with their hundreds of monthly minutes were just too expensive for that. I don�t have to be one of those people sitting in a restaurant talking on a cell phone while their companion sits there playing with their food, or walking down the aisles of the grocery store yammering away like some bozo who wants to discuss his movie deal while pawing through the different kinds of cheese in the dairy case, I can do most of my calling at home or at the office, thank you very much. I�m already paying close to $70 a month for phone service at home that I hardly ever use (except for access to the Internet).
So about five or six years ago, I simply bought an AT&T pay-as-you-go phone with some time-replenishing cards in a box and called it a day. It was a nice Eriksson phone (before they became Sony Eriksson), no frills, but utilized the (what I assume was) quite extensive AT&T network and even received e-mails, and it didn�t really matter whether you were at home or roaming or even in a foreign country, calls were a flat forty cents a minute, expensive when compared to regular calling plan per-minute rates, but it only takes a few minutes to call Triple-A, so what the heck.
This phone has served me well and I was happy to hang onto it even though everybody else I know seems to buy a brand new phone every couple of months, or so. As the phones got smaller, I kept remarking that I, at least, could still dial mine without a stylus.
My only real difficulty with the pay-as-you-go (what AT&T called �Free2Go�) plan was that you had to remember when to �add time� to the phone; that if you didn�t replenish its balance before the expiration date of the quantity you had just put in (in my case, 45 days for $10.00, the lowest replenishment quantity they would accept), you would lose all the time you had accumulated. But it you did replenish the phone in time, you got to keep what you had accumulated.
However, AT&T was most eager for you to actually lose all your accumulated time, and several times I did, because 45 days are a difficult quantity to keep track of. I�d put a notation on my calendar, but then might not look at the calendar for a while and I�d miss the date and lose hundreds of dollars worth of time that I had been accumulating. That did not make me very happy.
Finally, AT&T got a little more reasonable (maybe because they wanted to retain or lure in more customers) and instigated an automatic credit card replenishment plan, which I quickly signed up for. Every month AT&T would dutifully charge my credit card $10.00 (again the lowest quantity they would accept) and I�d get to keep all my accumulated minutes, so basically, it was like I had a $10 a month calling plan, but with an ever-growing cache of minutes to use.
But then Cingular bought AT&T out and the first thing they wanted to do was trash the $10.00 a month automatic replenishment plan. They welcomed us Aztecs to Cingular and then said $15.00 was the lowest quantity they would accept, now. Fifteen dollars isn�t much, but still it�s a 50% rate increase.
Also, somewhere along the line, they lost all the minutes I had from AT&T, about $90.00 worth. One day I was checking my balance and saw that I had only $8.50 worth, and I hadn�t used the phone for several months. I called their customer service to find about it and they had no explanation as to this loss of time. �You must have made a call and then didn�t properly hang up� was the explanation from the ditzy customer service girl, who sounded like she was an elementary school drop-out. I said that that was impossible, because my battery had gotten so that it wouldn�t hold its charge anymore and it took me quite some time to get around to buying a new battery. So the phone had been completely DEAD during the time I supposedly had �spent� $90 in phone calls. But she silently shrugged her shoulders and kept staring forward with a chorus girl smile painted on her face, I imagined. What could I do, sue them?
Then, last night, I got a letter from them explaining that they are getting rid of the $15.00 replenishment minimum, and now it has to be $25.00 worth, making this plan cost me $25.00 a month. Okay, so now it�s a 150% increase from what it was before they took over AT&T. Oh, and the per-minute charge had gone up, too�to fifty cents a minute.
Well, that ended that, as far as I was concerned. I may as well have a real calling plan, then! But I was reluctant to have to buy a new phone, as this Ericksson one still worked fine (I had gotten a new battery for it). I don�t really have to play �Doom� or have 49 polyphonic ring tones and a color photo of my cat (if I had a cat) as wallpaper on the full-color screen and send instant messages to everyone I know (laboriously typed out on the telephone�s numerical keypad, like this: �G, H; G, H, I�, �HI�. I just want to be able to TALK. (However, with so many people I know running around with Blackberries and Treos and various cordless Internet access devices or whatever, I had developed a desire to be able to access the Internet while out and about in my car, such as �This movie is sold out, but what time is Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy playing over at the Sherman Oaks 5, or perhaps I can make it to Lords of Dogtown at the Encino Town & Country?� How cool to be able to do that on a cell phone!)
Well, it seemed that every new calling plan involved first buying a new phone, and that seemed weird to me, so I called a place to find out about it and they explained something about �unlocking my phone� at a special place for about $20.00 and taking out and buying a new SIMS, which I guess is kind of like a chip inside the phone that ties it to one particular cell phone company, so I did some research on that concept and found out that there�s an additional complication concerning whether your phone and the carrier use GSM or CDMA or some other kind of digital technology, and they use different kinds of frequency, blah blah blah, and I thought I just wasn�t going to go through all this for a six-year-old telephone that most every other owner has by now thrown into the trash and replaced with a nifty new clamshell phone with bright blue backlights in the buttons and a ringer that plays �Bad to the Bone.�
T-Mobile seemed to have the best plan choice for me, their BASIC plan, which is $19.99 a month, and for that you get 60 anytime minutes and 500 weekend minutes. That sure wouldn�t be enough for the guy driving his Mercedes with the hands-free in his ear, or the typical teenager, but for me, that seems plenty (unless I drastically change my cell phone usage habits). And THEN, most excitingly, while seeing on the T-Mobile website demos of the phones they sell, I discovered that they have something called T-Zones, which is an Internet access system, and the woman in the demo actually did the very thing I wanted, and that was check movie times! So my little dream was coming true. The �unlimited T-Mobile web� costs an additional $5.99 a month, which I think is worth it.
Most of the phones they sold were simply free, because they offered �instant Internet order rebates�. After studying all the phones they offered (and glad that they had helped to narrow down the infinite phone choice to a good smattering of diverse offerings) and that did NOT cost upwards of two to three hundred dollars, I decided the one I wanted was the $119.99 Motorola V188 (with "Web-only discount of $119.99, so it was free), an elegant and stylish (yikes, I might want to use it more and have to get a more expensive plan!) black and silver clamshell phone with a color screen, standby time of 14 and a half days (a VAST improvement over my Ericksson whose battery runs out after two days), operates in all four frequencies (so can be used anywhere in the world), is a speaker phone that can be dialed by voice, has an external caller ID, and a calendar, alarm clock, and calculator, plus several other gizmos, and can even be connected to a computer via a USB cable for downloading calendar, address book, and other data. I mean, it is really beautiful and very cool! The phone service itself, besides making calls and having voice mail (which I had on the old AT&T plan), includes caller ID, conference calling, call forwarding, and call waiting. It also supports text messaging, but as that cost an additional monthly fee, I decided to skip that. I suppose if I get to the point that I will WANT text messaging, I�ll add that on. T-Mobile is also throwing in an extra battery, a charger (well, that would come with it anyway), and a hands-free headset. I also ordered a car charger.
Okay, so now I have taken one large leap in cell phone technology, and what I will be paying for all this is $25.98 a month, only a dollar more than the $25.00 a month that Cingular wanted to soak me for to only keep the same old, old-technology, no special features phone and a calling plan that would use up my time at the rate of fifty cents a minute and certainly would have no Internet access. I think I came out a winner in this transaction, and even if I somehow didn�t, I at least got to flip off Cingular.
Oh, at first I figured I would port my existing cell phone number over to the new phone, but then I asked myself �Why would I do that?� I never did memorize my existing phone number and I gave it out to hardly anybody. A new phone and plan deserves a new phone number. So if you are someone to whom I had given my cell phone number, I�ll have to give you my new one once I know what it is. The new phone is being shipped to me and should be here in three to five days.
Okay, now that�s done, maybe I can concentrate on the work I brought home to do! Tomorrow.
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