Hell Phone

A long time ago I swore that I'd never have a cell phone. Every time I saw someone talking on one in the grocery store, or worse yet driving, I'd think That's rude, stupid, a pain in the ass and dangerous!

As I've mentioned before, I have a bad history with telephones anyway, and the last thing in the world I want is one of the damn things following me around all day, ringing some cutesy tootsie ring tone in my pocket.

I don't even like the built in answering machines that allow people to leave a message. Dammit! If there's no answer, I'm not home! Call me later!

I've always asked Carol to handle the phone calls, because unlike me, she enjoys talking on the phone. Now that my voice is getting weak, just answering can be embarrassing. If I haven't used whats left of my voice recently my “Hello” comes out like a garbled frog's croak.

A couple of weeks ago when our niece Brandy drove JC and I over to Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis I finally realized that I should give up, join the rest of the world and get a cell phone. I was there to see our son Brad and when I asked the information lady where his room was, someone put their arm around me and said,”Never mind, I'll show him!” I turned around to see Nikki, Brad's daughter, who was there to visit her dad. I looked back and waved at Brandy and JC, wondering how we were ever going to get hooked up again.

Nikki couldn't stay long and left after a short visit. I didn't know where in the hell JC and Brandy were, in fact, I didn't even know for sure where I was, so I figured the best thing was for me to stay put. That was a good thing, because Brad and I had time for a nice long visit.

I knew that Brandy and JC both had cell phones and I realized that if I'd had one it would have been easy to keep in touch. Brandy showed up after a couple of hours, and we said goodbye to Brad and went down to pick up JC. On the way home I told JC that as much as I hated it, I was going to get a cell phone.

Monday Carol and I went shopping at WalMart, and after filling a shopping cart with the usual dog food, toilet paper, eggs, bacon and other junk we wheeled into the electronics department. It was fairly early and in spite of the Christmas shopping season, the store wasn't very busy. The lady in electronics asked if she could help and I told her we wanted a low priced, easy to use, cell phone with prepaid minutes. We told her that we only planned to use it for emergencies.

She sold us a Tracfone with five months service and a 60 minute card. She wasn't busy, so she did the activation process for us. I watched while she punched in serial numbers and answered questions, all the while talking to a machine voice somewhere, (probably India). After about 5 minutes, (which would have taken me hours, if I could have done it at all,) she said that if we would come back in a little while the activation would be finished. We checked out, loaded our purchases in the car and went back in to get our new phone.

“I wrote your new phone number on the box,” she said. “Do you remember what I showed you about operating it?”

“Uh yeah,” I lied, not wanting to take up any more of her time. With a doubtful look on her face she handed me our new cell phone.

Later at home I opened the small instruction book. “Well this doesn't look too bad! I think the sales lady did the hardest part, which was activating it!”

First I decided to program the cell phone number into the speed dial on our home phone, so I asked Carol where the instruction book was. Amazingly, she found it in a drawer right under the phone. I read the section on speed dialing, punched in the new number and named it. I hit the speed dial button, listened to it dial, and heard an operator say”You must dial “1” before you can dial this number!”

I went through the process again, entering “1” in front of the area code, tried it again and listened to a new message from the operator. “You do not need to dial “1” for this number! After several more unsuccessful attempts at trying it both ways, I was getting pissed. My tremors were getting bad and I found myself cussing out the operator, who couldn't care less because she was a recording.

I decided to give up on that for a while and work on setting up the cell phone. The instructions said that I needed to create my voice mail account. I really didn't want one, but the booklet said that was the next step, so I followed the instructions: Press and hold”1” for five seconds. I was already tired of “1”, but I did it and found myself listening to another female voiced recording rattling off instructions faster than I could think. “If you want to blah blah blah, press star. If you want to blah blah blah, press 3. Every time I'd lower the phone from my ear to push a button I could hear her tiny voice giving more options. After giving “her” a pin number for the second time, (the first didn't contain enough characters) I listened to more machine babble and hung up.

I decided to give it a try, and dialed the new number, one digit at a time, (the speed dial still hadn't decided if it wanted a “1” or not,) and instantly got voice mail. “Isn't the phone supposed to ring at least a couple of times before it sends you to voice mail?” I asked Carol.

“Try it again.” she said.

After 3 or 4 more attempts, and cussing out the voice mail operator recording, I gave up in disgust and decided to try and enter our “contacts” and their phone numbers. My tremors were so bad by then that every time I pushed a button the character repeated a half a dozen times across the screen.

“They ought to call these things 'Hell phones' instead of Cell phones!” I said, and poured myself a glass of wine. Carol called Brad and asked if he would help me set up our new phone and he laughingly agreed to help the old man out.

The next day we went to Brad and Donna's house. Brad turned the phone on and looked at the contacts I had set up, which wasn't much, just our land line number. “Lets see if we can fix the voice mail problem first,” he said. He dialed our cell number and the phone rang, surprising me. “It works! You fixed it!” I said.

With his steady fingers he entered the list of contacts that I gave him and when he finished he tried the voice mail again. “Yeah, that's working OK.” he said.

How can you tell,” I said, “the phone's not even turned on!”

“That's when voice mail is supposed to come on, when the phones not turned on, or after so many rings!”

I could feel my face getting red. “You mean it's supposed to be turned on all the time?”