New phone
Preliminaries: So when I get my confirmation slip of the new order, they've signed me up for a 200 minute plan. Well that should keep me satisfied for about two weeks. I call up customer service yesterday morning and the woman on the phone goes to change it and sort of snappishly tells me she can't change it. I'll have to fix it during activation.
I call up the B2B line, where I talk a guy who tells me roughly the same thing, but nicer. He's amused by the idea that I'm on the senior plan because "You don't sound like a senior citizen." But he assures me that in the notes section, it says that it's supposed to be the 450 plan, and gives me his name and says if there are any problems, I can call and ask for him, and he'll take care of it. That was reassuring.
Setup: Got the phone. Charged it for 2 hours. Took out the battery, popped out the sim card. Popped in my new sim card. Turned the phone on. It complained it needed an unlock code. Call AT&T activation line. AT&T people tell me they can't activate the old sim card in the new phone because it's too old and it's on their own network. But whatever fine. How long and miserable a process can it be to re-add every contact in my phone? Never mind that they told me on the phone that I could use my old sim card just fine on the new phone and actually recommended I swap them.
So I pop the old sim card out and she requests that I read the number. (For those who don't know, I have pretty bad dyscalclia, which I think is somehow related to my migraines, but the upshot is, reading a list of numbers is really hard for me. I have trouble reading them properly in sequence. Like dyslexia, if I slow down and really focus on the task, I can do okay. I slowed down, really focused and read two series of numbers correctly within three tries. There's nothing like coming face-to-face with your mental disorders while on the phone with customer service.) Then I put the sim card in the wrong way. (connectors to the left instead of the the right) That's not related to the dyscalclia. That's because I'm rattled by the whole thing. Pop the sim card back out. Pop it back in the right way. Turn the phone on. Now we have a ball game!
She attempts a test call. She can't call me. I call out. Works fine. I think it works fine, and am ready to hang up, but she explains that until she can call me, it most certainly does not work fine. I ask Robin The Midwife to call me. She confirms the "not working fine" diagnosis. My activation engineer (can I call her that?) calls in a support tech. The support tech needs do something called "rerouting." I'm not even sure how your reroute calls to a cellphone or what could be wrong with the original route to require rerouting, but after about 10, 15 minutes or so, she is able to call me. She thanks me for my patience, and then I get to begin the job that actually requires my patience. Cellphone configuration.
Background and settings: I was not idle while they were fixing my routing. I was (working and) adjusting the settings on my phone. I got rid of their busy, hard to see background and went to white text, which I quickly realized I hated because the signal bars instead of being nice visible bars, as they were for all the horrible backgrounds, became thin stick lines which were hard to see. Unable to find a non-busy, non-annoying still, and unable to set the background colour or control the bar "font" separately, I turned in desperation to the "screen savers." They had a solar system one with rotating planets that didn't suck, so I used it. At dinner Hoppie proposed himself as an alternative, so I snapped a picture of him and set that one. (Between us, I sorta like the solar system better, but it's funny to stare blankly at the phone when the phone is staring blankly back at me.)
Ringtone: As many of you know, since the demise of my first phone, I've been lamenting the fact that all subsequent ring tone packages have gotten worse. My original phone had 10 or 15 ringtones, including Dixie and Ride of Valkeries, and a few other classics. I always used Dixie. I like Dixie. It helps me keep in touch with my inner hillbilly. The last phone had 5, all in varying stages of bland. I lived with it. This one, in an effort to drive you to spend more money, comes with a single, annoying, ringtone, that was pretty much not going to go. Luckily, using the power of the internets, I found this: http://www.freewebs.com/countrydrive/. They had the same problem I did. (All they wanted was Dixie and they didn't want to have to pay for it. So they made one and posted it for free!)
Bluetooth: I paired the phone with my Palm. That went fine, but when I went I tried to surf the net it didn't work. I went to the AT&T and then the Nokia website to find out if there was a reason it wasn't working, but AFAICT, there wasn't. Then while I was verifying the settings on the phone, I realized that I'd selected AT&T as the provider on the Palm and the actual provider was cingular. So I switched and now it works.
Anna, this may interest you: http://www.craftyneedle.com/