Who Do I Think I Am??

This one's about the birds.

THE PROMPT: "FREE TOPIC DAY"

Good evening everyone! It's Free Topic Day! Topics are free! In honor of both the unofficial national holiday and Bill Murray movie of the same name, Groundhog Day, I'm gonna write about the same thing as yesterday! Blogging!

No I'm not. I'm terrified of having to write about it again, actually. What I'm gonna do over here is turn "Free Topic Day" into "topic-free day" instead, and speak to you all about a little situation that happened in these parts that we'll refer to as "Monday", if that's ok with you. Well, actually, even if it's not, here we go.

I'm not even going to get into the back-story of this, ahem, story. All I will say is that justjessica1 has been using the same phone since before I started stalking her we began talking about the possibility of me ever asking her out on a date (and if you're keeping score at home, that's over three and a half years of commitment to a single cellular phone).

She was finally eligible for an upgrade in November. After plenty of discussions, searching the internet, reviewing her options, we decided finally to go out and take a look. (That last sentence? That all happened Monday from around Noon-4pm). Mind you, this is all she's known for, well, for arguement's sake let's just call it four years:

{link:http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&tok=UKXl2Nuu1FRaoDrpJYBGyg&cp=11&gs_id=10&xhr=t&q=samsung+alias&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=610&wrapid=tljp1328227745032018&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=4751851620495724791&sa=X&ei=oCUrT5zDOMqBgweYisjkDw&sqi=2&ved=0CGYQ8wIwAg#}

Yeah, I Google'd it. Why? Cuz it's so damn old it's no longer on Verizon's website. Note the date of the review: November of 2006. I know kids that had that phone at the same time who are already on their 3rd iPhone. Yeesh! But anyway...

She wanted to upgrade, of course, to a smartphone. But she was afraid of the whole touchscreen deal. And I have a smartphone, but it's not a touchscreen, so I was, as usual, of little use to her. She narrowed down her choices to five (five??), no wait, six (six?!?) that she could upgrade to for free. Five because that's how many she could fit on Verizon's comparison page that she printed up, plus one Blackberry. I was rootin' hard for the underdog Blackberry. Why? Because I have one and I'm familiar with it. **Stares at Android**

There was no freakin' way we were going to the Verizon store, which was roughly halfway between our house and the mall. The customer service there is just plain awful. Talk about high pressure when they know they can get you, and not giving a flying fuck about you when you're not eligible for an upgrade. So we went to that other bastion of customer service at the mall, Best Buy. (And hey, I've got nice things to say about them...they sold me this here laptop that allows you the reader and myself the communicator to, uhhhh, communicate together. And they did a fine job on the transaction.)

Being that Jess and I both work in retail and speak very highly of our levels of customer service awesomeness (well, Jess is, actually, awesome), maybe we're biased when it comes to the customer service we receive. We got off to a rough start here. As soon as the guy asks us if we need help, his teenybopper coworker throws herself at him and gives him a big hug. Ugh. And the whole secondary purpose of this trip was to see the phones and touch them and see how they respond to Jess' fingertips. The only feature, besides being bolted to a counter and that cord-thingey, on all of these phones? They were plastic, non-working display-only models. Not cool.

The guy at Best Buy wrests himself away from this chick long enough to tell us that the Verizon store within the mall has real, working phones, and actually tells us to go there. So we did. And all of their phones are live. Sweet! Only, they had a total of zero phones Jess was interested in. All the phones she saw on the website? Yup, through Verizon, they're only available for free on the website. No luck there. Back to Best Buy.

We asked Johnny Huggable about touch screens, and how important it was to try one. He said they're basically all the same, which I agreed with, and made a few points I had made in our phone powwow before we left for the mall. He wouldn't power one up for us, but he let Jess tinker around on his phone. We had almost settled on a specific one after talking about it, but something didn't feel right. I knew Jess would want to have a physical keyboard as well. And they had a touchscreen phone with a slide-out keyboard. For $100. She'd said she'd pay $50, but no way was she paying $100. Johnny Huggable and I immediately gravitated to the $100 phone, and Jess loved it. Can you say "conundrum"?

Johnny Huggable has seen us walk out of his store once, and the only way he was gonna let us walk out again was with a new phone. So he made a phone call. He says Radio Shack has the same phone for free on a two-year upgrade. He's gonna get his boss' approval to match it. Boss says yes! Done deal! Sign the paperwork! Let's eat! Figuring that might be a few minutes, I was headed off to the music section...before I got a brilliant idea. Radio Shack was only a few stores over...could we see if they have a working one, just to be sure? Johnny Huggable was all for it.

So off we went. Radio Shack. The one person working was ringing someone else out. No big. We wait by the also-inoperable phones, hoping he'll pull a working one out of his magic phone sack for us. And as the other customer walks out, another walks in. And in failing to acknowledge us before this new customer, we did what the person walking out was doing as well. Sign us up, Johnny!!

It's not often that I say this (so pay attention), but, when I got bored in the music section, I went back over to check on them. Jess, ever the conversationalist, already knows where this guy works at his other job, they've already established a mutual friend, Jess' life story is coming out, this guy's life story is coming out, and there still isn't a newly-activated phone. We went from "estimated time: done" to "estimated wait: one hour". Why an hour? Because Johnny Huggable was gonna have this girl a pro at her new phone when we walked out also. Otherwise, all night it'd be one question after another about a device I'm unfamiliar with. See why I was rootin' hard for the Blackberry? Ask him anything and everything, honey. Cuz on top of not knowing much about it, it's also going to be 9pm by the time we get home. Did I mention we set out around 4pm?

When all was finally said and done, final thank-you's and handshakes later, it was damn near 8pm, and we still hadn't eaten. I won't even get into that chore. I'm a slow eater, so if I finish before you, them's problems. Time upon arrival at our final destination of home? Just after nine. And we only live about 10 minutes from the mall. Understandable, Jess played with her phone all through dinner and the way home. Kid-with-a-new-toy Syndrome, I think it's called. Setting ringers, "what's this, what's that?", all the features...yup, those are the symptoms. All I said was "You better learn how to set the alarm". The look I got suggested that I had asked her to do work at the "New Phone" Country Club.

The abbreviated evening home was relatively painless. Once she figured out how to use Facebook on it, she was pretty satisfied. And ladies, there's nothing more romantic than commenting on your boyfriend's status from the living room while he's on his laptop in the basement.

Our story doesn't end there, folks. Stay tuned for a (much shorter) second part after the break.

MUSICAL BREAK!!:

I may have used this track during the very first "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  I was in, but most of you weren't a part of it, so it's like it never existed. Hell, some of you probably didn't exist when this song was popular either. But it fits. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkS0XApMJuE

Ahhh, boy bands. On American Bandstand. Yes, that actually happened.

VITAL STATS:

So I pick Jess up from work yesterday, and she declares "I've got Angry Birds!" You know, the game you launch birds into structures and stuff. I've seen it, I've heard of it, but I never played it. Well, she got stuck on a level, let me try it, and she's been hiding her phone from me ever since. Yup, I'm addicted. Exactly the reason why I'll never play "Words With Friends".

(All in good fun) One of my superiors at work, in the last two days, has called me a fuckin' jerk, told me to fuck off, and then, when I was telling the story about this to our boss, proceeded to call me a liar. I must be doin' somethin' right! That's the reward for cleaning up her mess, and suggesting after she split her pants that instead of going home to change, she just wear a pair of Pajama Jeans. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HD9BmRtdSs) How did I not win Employee Of The Month this month??

And then I saw this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttoitpdbbak...and I'm hereby authorizing you to kill me without question if I ever stoop to this. Got it? GOT IT??

Ok folks, that's enough fun for tonight. Thanks for lettin' me kill more than a couple minutes of your time. We'll do it again tomorrow, won't we? Alright. Well, y'all have a fun night, be good to one another, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WNrx2jq184