July 10, 2015
Dear Everyone:
When did you last replace the
battery in your car?
How old is your
refrigerator?
The laptop or
tablet?
The printer? How long have
you been clinging to that
cell phone?
And how old is the
mattress you sleep on every night?
Too old? How do you
know?
A while ago, I started a “gadget log”.
It is actually a simple spreadsheet with the item and when it was
last purchased or replaced.
Some are easy. I bought the
new refrigerator when I moved into my current place, for the simple
reason that the old fridge was too big to fit in the available space.
Plus the space was plumbed so I could get a built-in ice maker
and water filter.
I bought the new washing machine and
dryer when I got fed up with the
one(s) that came in the tiny closet that houses the “laundry” about a
year after I moved in. And,
for the record, the bed is 10 years old and won’t need replacing until
2020.
A couple of weeks ago I tried to make a call using my cell phone.
It wasn’t a number in my list of Contacts, so I was tapping the
digits in when the phone suddenly said, “Goodbye!” and shut down.
Annoying, but hardly critical.
Until I tried again and the same thing happened a second time.
Eventually, I did make the call.
And looked up the gadget log to confirm that this phone was just
over 2-½ years old. The
average lifespan on a cell phone is about two years which, not quite
coincidentally, is the duration of an average provider’s contract.
In other words: Time
to get a new cell phone.
In fact, I had been eyeing cell phones for a while now, noticing how
much bigger the new ones are in comparison to the “older” varieties.
At the last monthly ARMA meeting, I kept hearing bird calls,
which I realized were coming from our Membership Director’s bag.
When she fished the phone out, it looked twice the size of mine.
And there were all those news stories about the new
iPhones that
had a tendency to bend in some people’s back pockets.
Nevertheless, the time to replace the phone should be before the current
one suddenly goes belly up, right at the most inconvenient time.
Actually, I feel that way about all appliances.
So I stopped in the Big Phone Company store last Monday to check out the
possibilities.
Interestingly, the Big Phone Company employs the same Customer Service
Protocol that the Big Cable Company uses.
As soon as you enter, someone takes your name and puts it in a
queue. You are then free to
wander around the store, looking at nifty electronic devices, or just
watching TV on really big screens tuned to the Big Phone Company’s own
Cable TV Service, until a sales representative calls your name.
In no time I was perched precariously on a tiny bar stool across the
table from “Adam” who was more than eager to help me pick out a new
phone.
First Criteria:
Windows
operating system. I had
already discovered that my current phone, which uses
Windows version
8.something, was linked to my
online email account, which meant it was
also linked to my calendar and contact list.
I had no interest in re-inventing the wheel with another system.
“Adam” confided to me that this was so much easier than playing
musical chairs with the
SIM cards.
In fact, all he had to do was enter my current cell phone number into
the new phone and presto!
The new phone was happy to work for me while the old phone was just as
pleased to become a paper weight.
The only thing left was to identify what plan I would be in now.
Naturally, the old plan had become obsolete.
The new plan, along with monthly installments to pay for the new
phone, came within cents of the old plan, so it was all a wash.
And now I have a new phone that is actually not that much bigger than
the old one. About
½-centimeter longer, much the same across and about half as thick.
Most importantly, it fits in the designated pocket in my purse.
Once I got home, I identified my online email address, which also
happens to be my Microsoft account, and within minutes all of my
contacts and calendar events showed up on the phone.
Back in the store, “Adam” had been commiserating with me on the
chore of linking the new phone to my
home wireless network, what with
the 16-character alphanumeric password to tap in.
So imagine my surprise when I checked and found that the new phone had
already found the network and signed in with no help from me.
Apparently, it got the information from the old phone, via the
mutually-agreed-upon phone number.
Kind of makes you wonder just how much all these electronic
devices are talking to each other, doesn’t it?
In the meantime, the new phone has lots and lots of those Tiles that are
a part of Windows 8, most of which I have absolutely no use for.
But some of them are helpful.
Like the Weather Tile. It
shows me what the conditions are outside (so much easier than just
looking out the window) and what they can expect to be tonight and
tomorrow. When I tapped the
Tile, it blossomed out to fill the nice, big screen with my “Favorite”
weather reports. The ones
from my laptop, which show the current conditions in
Lake Oswego,
Oregon; Tucson, Arizona;
Charlotte, North Carolina;
Clinton Corners, New
York; and
Concord, California.
So how did the phone know which Favorites are on my laptop?
Microsoft, of course.
After all that fuss about the
National Security Agency spying on
ordinary citizens and just how did that
nut case in
South Carolina get a
gun when his name should have been on the “no-buy” list, does anyone
know how much the “Microsofties” know about each of us?
Only
Big Brother knows for sure.
Love, as always,
Pete
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