dawning of the age

So I meant to write an exciting blog about 2 consecutive days of snowboarding, followed by a snow storm and a night of snowshoeing. Unfortunately I was too busy playing in the snow to do that. Instead I shall welcome the dawning of the age of yuppiness. Ohh, sure I've been a yuppy for a while. Driving around in sports cars, wearing suits to work, dreading going to work in the morning, and so on. But yesterday I crossed the line.

I went out and not only bought a blackberry. I bought the fancy-shmanciest blackberry on the market, the Blackberry Bold (or Crackberry Cold if you like). I'm not counting the storm because I think they feel weird.
I don't really know what it can do so far. I have found an app where I talk and it searches for things from my voice. Google maps will find my location and be a GPS for me, with street view. I shall see.


Now for the long rambling story. Jenny gets an ATT discount through work and Tmobile doesn't get great coverage in this area, so we were thinking of switching plans. Since Skidaway ate my phone for dinner a couple years ago I still had a contract. This was going to end on 5/24/09. I looked at Tmobile's contract and saw that with over 180 days, it cost $200 to terminate a contract and with less than 180 it cost $100. Since my work will cover some of the expense of me getting a blackberry, I figured it would make up for this loss. ATT is so proud if it's 3G network that I felt like I had to use it but the Bold was the only blackberry with 3G capabilities and I do love toys. Yes, I had a sidekick before all the kids of the world even knew they existed. Jenny found a cool Pantech Matrix. It slides out to a QWERTY keyboard in one direction and a number pad in the perpendicular direction. So we went to get these. Oh, I missed a part and don't want to edit this. We got to the store at 7:05 and the sign said they closed at 7:00. Lucky for us the door was unlocked. We later found out the lock was broken (: So we went to get the phones and to jenny's discontent they did not have the Matrix. A bit later she settled on another phone and we asked to be put on the waiting list for the cool phone. So 45 minutes later a contract is signed, hundreds of dollars have vacated my life, and we are at home. I was a bit afraid ATT was going to rip us off, so I made sure we liked that deal before calling Tmobile.

I called Tmobile and they tried to pull the ole' "you owe us $200" game. I explained about the 180 days and asked to talk to a supervisor. They said he was in meeting and he would call me back in an hour. Two hours late I call back. By this time I read the contract in more detail and they had a fair argument. There is a link in the contract for people who signed before a certain date to go to in order to get their contract (very shady). It now takes about another half-hour of me explaining how my wife works all the time and she has no coverage there and how we need to switch. No deal.

Now I am going to go back to ATT and give up on my blackberry dreams. I head over at lunch and wait patiently to talk to the worker there. He listens to my story and says it won't be a problem to cancel my plan. At the last second he runs behind the scenes and comes back with a counter offer of 50 bucks for me plus 50 bucks for jenny to keep the phones. Deal!

Now I got my blackberry and jenny has her second best phone. At 5:00, I get a call and the cell phone guy says "guess what?" I quickly figure out that he has her phone...The Matrix.


The villagers rejoice.