Verizon-Tastic

So this is uncharacteristically after the fact of me, but here is an article from the P-I a couple weeks ago about my cell phone woes and the resultant happy aftermath. Long story short, I was having massive troubles with my crappy phone and crappy T-Mobile service – it had been good for ages and then both the service and the actual phone and battery started sucking all at once, hard. Plus I started suddenly texting with a certain few people a lot more (you know who you are!) so I was getting ridiculously expensive charges for that, and I didn’t want to pay $10/month for texting. So I sat around whining about it a lot and missing a lot of calls.

But as serendipity would have it, a friend at the P-I who used to have great advice column submissions decided to call in a “favor” – you’ll see why the quotations are merited in a few lines – for a colleague of hers. Seems the colleague needed a submission to her own Consumer Alerts type column, and well, my friend thought of me… which was quite convenient for me. So I wrote the friend’s friend (Candace, who wrote the article) and blathered on and on (of course, in my typical fashion, not realizing until after the fact that everything I said was in fact on the record) and she did all this awesome research, pitting companies against each other to win me as a customer given my ridiculous and lengthy and particular list of requirements, etc.

In the end, Verizon won, and I got myself one of them kickass Chocolate phones from LG. I was skeptical about having a phone that to me seemed like a 13 year old’s wet dream, plus I wasn’t sure about LG after having had Motorollas for my past three phones… but I got a great deal by quoting the Internet price to the in-store rep, and I got a bunch of free and discounted accessories (which is important for me since I never remember to charge my phone so I always just keep a charger at home, one at work, and one in the car. Memory therapy would probably be cheaper, in hindsight). It was a great deal, a great phone (with the slight exception that it’s easy to accidentally mute calls with your face if you use a touch-tone menu, because typing any number key unlocks the touch-sensitive panel your cheek rests against) and I’m excited to learn how to load mp3s onto it, something I have yet to find the time to do. But soon! And it takes pictures and videos, and has a pseudo Palm Pilot-y agenda function.

Best of all, this was ME doing a “favor” to HER. I kept asking my friend where I should send the fruit basket as a thank-you, and they seemed to think I was kidding…