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lost cell phone
Nov. 6th, 2004 09:21 pmI don't depend on my cell phone the way I depend on access to e-mail and other kinds of computer connectivity. But it's still troubling to realize that my phone is gone. Maybe it fell out of my pocket (*) in the lobby of my credit union (**) and I can reclaim it next week. If I lost it somewhere else, it's probably gone forever.
My cell phone never put me in constant contact, or even constantly on call. I spend most of my time in places that don't get cell phone signals, or they're too noisy for phone conversations. (A car gives you privacy and relative silence. Walking down the street, or riding a train, is just terrible for signal:noise.) But it was very useful to have a phone number that moved with me, across jobs and homes and so forth, to put on my resume and business cards and give to friends I might see infrequently. Or frequently, as in "call me tomorrow, I don't know if I'll be home, but I still want to talk to you." So a lot of you have this phone number. If the phone is really gone, I don't know how to work it out with Sprint to transfer the number to a new phone. If I have to get a new number, I don't want to keep paying for however many months are left on the old contract. Or maybe just pay a little fee for one of those messages that says, "beep-beep-beep, this number has been changed to [whatever]."
(ETA footnotes)
* Those kangaroo pockets in sweatshirts are useful for keeping hands warm in slightly chilly weather. They always look like they'd be useful for actually holding stuff but this is dangerously misleading, as the stuff always falls out. At least in my experience, which does not (thank goodness) include the carrying around of baby kangaroos.
** I wasn't in the credit union to do banking. Like almost everybody else, I do my banking remotely. (Which makes me wonder why Arlington's Town Meeting Zoning Committee thinks it's a good idea to fill the town with bank branches, instead of apartment buildings or shops.) My former employer owns a patent that was filed when I worked for them, and they ask me to sign stuff about it every time they take another legal action around it. (Extending the patent to another country, or expanding it to include someone else's recent work.) In September, they sent me stuff that needed to be signed and notarized. My credit union has a notary that would notarize the papers for me, if I could get there when they're open, and it's taken me this long to arrange that. It hardly seems worth it.
My cell phone never put me in constant contact, or even constantly on call. I spend most of my time in places that don't get cell phone signals, or they're too noisy for phone conversations. (A car gives you privacy and relative silence. Walking down the street, or riding a train, is just terrible for signal:noise.) But it was very useful to have a phone number that moved with me, across jobs and homes and so forth, to put on my resume and business cards and give to friends I might see infrequently. Or frequently, as in "call me tomorrow, I don't know if I'll be home, but I still want to talk to you." So a lot of you have this phone number. If the phone is really gone, I don't know how to work it out with Sprint to transfer the number to a new phone. If I have to get a new number, I don't want to keep paying for however many months are left on the old contract. Or maybe just pay a little fee for one of those messages that says, "beep-beep-beep, this number has been changed to [whatever]."
(ETA footnotes)
* Those kangaroo pockets in sweatshirts are useful for keeping hands warm in slightly chilly weather. They always look like they'd be useful for actually holding stuff but this is dangerously misleading, as the stuff always falls out. At least in my experience, which does not (thank goodness) include the carrying around of baby kangaroos.
** I wasn't in the credit union to do banking. Like almost everybody else, I do my banking remotely. (Which makes me wonder why Arlington's Town Meeting Zoning Committee thinks it's a good idea to fill the town with bank branches, instead of apartment buildings or shops.) My former employer owns a patent that was filed when I worked for them, and they ask me to sign stuff about it every time they take another legal action around it. (Extending the patent to another country, or expanding it to include someone else's recent work.) In September, they sent me stuff that needed to be signed and notarized. My credit union has a notary that would notarize the papers for me, if I could get there when they're open, and it's taken me this long to arrange that. It hardly seems worth it.
