A New Phone

My mobile phone broke on Thursday. This was a phone I had owned since 1999, apparently there have been a couple of advances in this technology over the past 8 years! :-) It had become the subject of many jokes from friends over the years and even an x-ray security screener at Chicago airport stopped the belt and held up screening passengers while waving my phone around in the air to show her friends, laughing while saying "I haven't seen one of these in a while!".

However, in the interests of time and also because I would have found it amusing, I had hoped to simply transfer my number from this phone to another identical old phone that I had. This proved to be a much tougher task than I had first thought. The conversation with the Sprint representative went around in circles along the following lines for about 20 minutes:

Rep: "Enter the following code into your phone and press the 'OK' button".
Me: "My phone does not have an 'OK' button".
Rep: "All phones have an 'OK' button".
Me: "Apparently not".
Rep: "Do you see the navigation keys?".
Me: "Yes".
Rep: "The 'OK' button is the button in the middle of the navigation keys".
Me: "There is no button in the middle of the navigation keys".
Rep: "Please hold" (5 minutes later) "Enter the following code into your phone and press the 'OK' button".
etc...

Eventually, she gave up and told me I would have to go to a Sprint store to get this switched. I figured that if I had to make the effort to go to the store, that I probably should upgrade at the same time, so armed with a $150 discount for extending my service contract, I went to the store.

The sales rep saw my phone, smiled and then asked me "Well, what would you want your new phone to do". I replied that "Clearly, I am not particularly fussy". Due to being able to get another $50 rebate I settled on the Motorola Razr model, a considerable improvement on my previous model. The post script to the story is that when the salesman offered to download my contacts into the new phone, he had to admit that they did not even have a cable that could fit it! So basically, my phone was so old that even the Sprint store could not maintain or support it. Perhaps it was time for something new!