Sunday, October 16, 2016

Oddness and telephone service



     The phone stopped working.
     So my wife called AT&T, to see what the problem was. 
     During the 45 minutes she was on hold, she asked, "Should I just cancel our line?" Lots of people are doing that now. No need for land lines. Cell phones are sufficient. 
     "Go for it," I said. The only people who call are surveys and charity come-ons, inevitably while I'm trying to nap. And my mother, though she can call my cell. 
      But when my wife finally got a representative, she found it would cost $10 a month more to not have a phone, under our plan. It seemed odd to pay for a service we'd no longer be getting. Might as well keep it. 
     She continued on hold.  A thought came to me. 
     "Why get the line fixed?" I asked. We didn't want a phone. We could pay the extra ten bucks a month to have the line discontinued. Or we could just leave it dysfunctional and get the same result: no phone. Heck, we could throw our phones away — except of course for the rotary dial classic that I bought for $5 on eBay just because I wanted one. 
    My wife's face fell.
     "We're paying for it," she said. "We might as well get the service."
     A service, I hasten to add, we no longer want.
     That's psychology for you. 
     So we'll have to wait until our contract is up, in January, when we can discontinue home phone service without paying the penalty. It'll seem odd, without it. Then again, lots of stuff feels odd lately. Oddness seems a condition of 21st century existence. 

5 comments:

  1. It's the computer of course. The problem with your phone as well as the cause of the weirdness of the 21st Century. When phones were connected by wires only, they were easy to fix -- even a kluck like me could do so. But the computer -- what an unfortunate name. It does add, subtract, multiply and divide the way the hordes of women hired to keep statistics used to do, but more important today is its function as a second brain for us all. And why should we think that the brain humans have made would be more reliable than the one we're all born with?

    john

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  2. We just switched to AT+T from Comcast for our phone, tv and computer bundle, because it's half the cost (for now anyway).

    LindaB

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  3. So it was your Ed McElroy who died the other day. It's been quite a while since we've heard anything about him.

    John

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    Replies
    1. I wrote a piece last year, on his 90th birthday. I didn't want to overdo it -- he would have had me write one every month. I did write a column for tomorrow though.

      Delete
  4. You must have some bundled plan with AT&T, for them to charge you more for no phone.

    ReplyDelete

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