Yesterday, to my great dismay, my cell phone died before I left for work. It had mysteriously powered off. It didn't even beep the way it usually does when the battery is low. When I plugged it into the charger, the charge light wouldn't come on. Doh!

Since I didn't have time to handle it before rushing off to the grocery store for my shift, I reluctantly left the problem to handle later.

When I returned home last night, I tried messing around with the poor thing a little more. Unlike earlier in the afternoon, when I pushed the power button, it came on! Plugging it into the charger lit up the red light as usual. Had I imagined the whole thing? /p>

I left it to charge and went to bed, quite relieved that it was working fine again.

Woke up this morning, and found that the phone was completely dead again. Wouldn't power on. Wouldn't charge. Another "Doh!"

Fortunately, when I purchased it last year, I bought the 2 year service plan, guaranteeing a free repair or replacement in the event of an outage.

The only trick was finding the paperwork from the transaction amidst my piles of boxes and other junk. I felt exceedingly lucky (and proud of my organizational skills) when the first box I checked, labeled "manuals and papers", contained the appropriate receipt and warranty brochure very near the top of the stack of other unrelated dead tree material.

With the paperwork in hand, I grabbed the phone charger, and made a run to the nearest Best Buy (which also happened to be the same store in Westminster where I made the purchase). I explained the problem, and added that I suspected (but wasn't 100% certain) that the battery had gone bad.

The pseudo-friendly customer service representive told me that before any repairs or replacements could be performed, I would need to take the phone to the nearest AT&T Wireless center, get them to diagnose the problem, and fill out a form detailing the cause of the problem. Then I could return to Best Buy for the appropriate repairs or replacements as deemed necessary.

This, while annoying, was somewhat understandable. After all, if it was something other than a bad batter, Best Buy would be unlikely to have sufficient diagnostic equipment in-house to determine the nature of the problem. (I was 98% certain that simply dropping in a replacement battery would fix the problem; my only uncertainty was caused by the intermittent nature of the malfunction.)

She asked me if I knew the location of a local AT&T Wireless Center. Playing the moronic customer that I was, I replied that I had no clue. (I was almost about to say that I could probably find out for myself easily enough by looking in the phone book, but if they had the information on-hand, why go to the trouble of returning home just to look up an address that might be across the street from here?)

Naturally enough, she had no clue either. She queried a bunch of other random employees behind the service desk, who were also clueless. (Customer Service Interactions 101: People who work behind a counter are expected to know every imaginable fact in the universe, no matter how obscure. If they don't, by God, there must be something wrong with them.)

When that failed, she resorted to calling in a manager over the loudspeaker. When he arrived, they had a discussion whose precise contents were slightly out of my earshot. I almost had to laugh when I saw him walk over a nearby counter, reach underneath it, and pull out a phonebook. He then proceeded to pick up a phone, call a number, and relay the information to the person I had talked to. (Rule #2 of Customer Service Interactions 101: Standard drones, by design, are completely incapable of using common sense on their own. Instead, management must be called in to handle anything that isn't an exact match for the basic cases they were explicitly trained to handle.)

A few moments later, she came back with a victorious gleam and told me the location of the service center. The Flatirons Crossing area, "next to the Bahama Breeze restaurant." She also informed me that if I wished, I could also go to the Best Buy near Flatirons to get the required repairs, since it would be much closer than to drive all the way back to Westminster.

Bahama Breeze. The name sounded vaguely familiar, although I couldn't recall exactly where I had seen it. No matter. I could find it easily enough. Besides, I didn't want to torture the poor creature any further by irquiring whether she happened to know exactly where in Flatirons this restaurant was, which could potentially result in another polling of present employees, announcements requesting management (who had walked away by now), and more phone conversations. Easier to go wander around until I spotted it. (Yes, I've been through the same training. "If a customer asks a question, never tell them you don't know the answer. If you don't know, keep looking until you find someone who does." Blah.)

I wandered to the Flatirons mall (formerly known as the "new mall", until that designation was displaced by the new Colorado Mills mall down south), and made my not-so-grand entrace. I started looking up and down the Flatirons Village, as I thought it might have been an outdoor restaurant somewhere. It was not in the Village Directory, so I checked the indoor mall. Nothing in that directory either, nor was there an ATT center listed.

Hmmmmm... Must be in one of the adjacent shopping centers. I though for sure I had seen an AT&T center around somewhere, not to mention the Bahama Breeze restaurant it was supposed to be next to.

I drove across the intersection to the Noodles and Wahoo's shopping center. Aha! Right next to Wahoo's was the ATT Center. I knew I had seen it before. I looked around for this obscure place known as "Bahama Breeze". Scanning around revealed that it was on the corner, written in funky letters that sort of blend into the background.

Now, if she had just said, "It's next to the Noodles and Wahoo's near Flatirons Crossing, I would have known exactly what she was talking about immediately." Ho hum. At least now, if anybody ever mentions Bahama Breeze again, I'll know exactly where it is.

I parked and carried my miniature payload (consisting of phone, charger, and warranty receipt just in case) into the ATT store. I explained to the good-humored person there the situation, and stated that though I suspected a bad battery, I didn't know for certain, and had been told to report here for a definitive diagnosis.

He said that basicly the only thing they could do would be to plug in a different battery and see if it worked. (Duh.) Well, if doing that would prove to Best Buy (and me) the exact nature of the problem, I would be happy with it.

So he proceeded to pull a replacement battery off the shelf, put it in the phone, and it came on without a problem. Bad battery. Problem solved. He added that if the phone had been less than a year old, he probably could have given me a replacement on the spot, since virtually all phones are guaranteed for a year by the AT&T warranty. But since I had a 2 year Best Buy warranty, they should honor it if I took it back to their store.

I told him that Best Buy had wanted a form from the ATT Center about the problem. I was perfectly satisfied with this demonstration, but Best Buy wanted "a form."

He pulled an AT&T business card from the stack at the counter, turned it over, wrote "Bad Battery!" on the back, signed it with his initials, and handed it to me.

LOL.

"There isn't no damn form. Best Buy should honor their warranty though. Take it to them."

I took the phone back to the car, and just for fun, tried hitting the power button again. It came on! The indicator also showed that the battery was fully charged.

He had definitely put my battery back in though, since it was a different color, and the surface on mine was worn. It was my battery. Spooky gremlins!

Maybe a bad contact on the battery slot? I took the battery out, made sure the contacts were clean, dusted it, and put the battery back in.

This time, the phone would not come back on. Dead.

On to Best Buy again!

I took the girl's advise, and proceeded across the street to the Broomfield Best Buy. Took the phone+charger in, my warranty receipt, and also had the Bad Battery business card, just in case they tried to give me the runaround too.

I showed the person at the customer service desk the warranty, said that the phone had a bad battery (this time, I was sure, except for the most recent gremlins, which I decided to ignore in my account so as not to be sent back to the hapless AT&T center). My only fear was that the instant I handed the phone over, she would turn it on, and it would magically start working again.

I handed her the phone as requested, and she disappeared into the back room with it for a few moments. A couple minutes later, she emerged with some new paperwork (and no phone), and started to fill it out. She informed me that I would be getting a brand new phone. All I had to do would be to walk over the cell phone counter, ask for a new one, and bring it back to the desk. (Or, if I felt so inclined, get a better newer model, and pay the difference in price.)

Although I suspected all it needed was a new battery, I had no objection to this idea. If they wanted, they could take the entire phone, and any resident gremlins that might inhabit it.

The only thing I didn't like about it was that I would lose my phone number directory and all my settings. The settings would be easy to redo. The number directory.... well, that will mostly involve a lot of wandering around asking various people I know for their phone numbers again. Ho hum. Maybe I should keep that sort of info backed up somewhere, huh?

Well, they had another phone of the exact same model. The new one is silver. My old one was gray. The exact same model has also gone up in price by $20 since I bought it last year. That's nutty. (A brief look at the counter told me that the entire batch of phones they carry have a higher price range than I remember seeing before.) But of course, since it was the same model, I didn't have to pay the difference in price. When I returned, she was bagging up my old phone, presumably to send back to the mysterious unknown.

After filling out a few forms, I walked out of the store with a new phone, and instructions to call ATT and give them its new id number (whatever it's called) so they can switch my account over. Yippee.

Last I checked, the shiny new phone was charging over at mom's place.

As I drove home, a silly wave of sentimentalism came over me. I wished I still had the old phone, even if it was no good anymore. It wasn't just because it had all my friends' phone numbers. A cell phone is an emotional thing. Though I don't make extensive use of it, it's one of the few objects that I carry with me virtually everyhere, every day, all the time, which is probably why it was starting to look so worn, even though it was only a year old. Different jobs, different apartments, different living situations. Same cell phone through it all. This one went with me to San Antonio. To Longview. To a little apartment complex where I had fucked my first whore.

(Side tangent: I remember panicking as I left that night. After I had gotten in the car and driven halfway down the block to return home, I realized my phone wasn't on me. I must have left it inside. I jumed outside, flagged her down, as she was also driving away, and convinced her to let me back in to look for it. It wasn't there. Turns out it was under my carseat. Right where I had left it. Whew!)

All sorts of memories accumulated over the past year, somehow attached to a little piece of metal I carried in my pocket.

[Bitscape proceeds to collapse into a fit of sobs. "And I didn't even get to say goodbye to the poor little thing..."]

[Or... maybe not. Haha!]

Before ending this terribly sentimental segue... I still have my ancient cell phone in a box somewhere (the first one, that I paid a penny for back when we were living in the Louisville Compound). I didn't want to throw it away, even in the move, even though I knew I would never use it again. It was my first phone, dammit!

Yes, it has now been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that Bitscape is wierd about cell phones. Case closed.

What memories will the new phone accumulate? I wonder...

Music recommendation tonight: Check out The Razor Skyline. Probably their best known song (and the one I've had on my hard drive for years) is Queen of Heaven. Their newer stuff is also sweet though.

(I'm beginning to wonder if I should setup a separate db table for music recommendations, but I think I'll hold off on that for now.)