As I started to say, my grandpa phone was so old, it had developed prostate problems.
But that’s not why I gave it up.
That story begins a couple of months ago.
Like most people, my wife and I understood that, though changes were coming, we would be able to use our dumb phones until the end of the year. (Note: “dumb” and “grandpa” are now synonyms.)
But the day came when we found ourselves unable to make or receive calls or texts.
Immediately, my wife, who would have made a fine inspector general until getting fired for actually doing her job, was on the case. Because, despite living with me for more than 40 years, she continues to insist that the world she lives in makes sense.
“Yes,” she told the first customer service representative, we understood the 5G change would arrive Jan. 1 – and we appreciated the specials being offered so we could transition to smart phones.
But a promise had been made that what we had would work until Dec. 31.
She then repeated the essentially same message until being given the number of a more experienced customer service representative.
Two or three numbers later, finding himself in a corner, our then representative assured us that we could indeed continue to use our phones until Dec. 31.
And that was true, to a point.
Because if we drove a mile or two from our home, we would be able to make calls and receive texts – a fact I discovered while riding on trails with my grandpa phone in my pocket.
But his response overlooked the fact that we would be unable to make them from our home, which was why my wife had called in the first place.
Because this representative exhibited the proper shame in mid-sentence when he realized what he had been saying, I didn’t get angry with him.
In fact, he inspired me.
I imagined our provider launching a new advertising campaign to introduce its Ultimate Inconvenience Plan – a plan that would allow customers to continue to use their phones, although not at their homes, while being allowed to pay the same competitive rates as those who could use their phones at their home. Imagine the possibilities for capturing the homeless market.
It’s not so much that my wife wasn’t amused, as she was in no frame of mind to be distracted from tracking down the large, rapidly decomposing rat she had begun to smell.
So, she put her head down once again, and began hammering her way through another strata of the customer relations bureaucracy.
This next segment of her life journey provided the opportunity to develop a mediation practice by connecting her with this soothing, looped recording: “Thank you for calling. We value you as a customer. Be assured that your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. Because of heavy call volumes, a customer service representative yet to be hired or pass a drug screening test should be available help you in January.”
Somewhere in all of this, my wife was connected with a woman from Southern California who, learning that we live in Ohio, asked whether our phone trouble might be the result of our residing along some dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Although she clearly was a seasoned professional, we felt certain she would fail the Ohio Citizenship Test, which requires the candidate to correctly pronounce Russia, Versailles, Lima and Houston before reaching the honors program requirement, Bellefontaine.
Demonstrating what one book title describes as “the tenacity of cockroach,” my wife finally was able to reach the person someone had suggested she talk to three or four customer representatives earlier: A guy on the tech side of things.
From what I imagined to be a desk next to a furnace in a basement – and after a relatively short conversation – the tech guy apologetically told us his best guess as to what had happened: That in the year-long process of conversion to 5G service, our local tower had been changed over early.
That mean we were, in the language of 5G, SOL: Simply Out of Luck.
At this point, I congratulated my wife and urged her to her to stop badgering (cockroaching) the poor man.
No, our phone problem had not been solved, which is an experience reserved for the afterlife.
But she had succeeded beyond all expectation. Not only had she completed Diogenes’ centuries-long quest to find an honest man, that very man had, despite a gender deficiency that put him at high risk for becoming a grandpa, provided her with the unthinkable.
He had told her the plain truth – a truth that set us free to do what was necessary to move on: Lay down the burden of our grandpa phones, leaving chronic prostate problems in the past, and buy the smart phones that represent a brighter future.
We wish him the best in his forced retirement.