PAgent’s Progress

I will be hitting the road tomorrow, to spend the weekend with my buddies. Although this would generally be the source of great joy, it will be tempered by the unhappy reason for the get-together: One of my buds is heading to the Antipodes, where he will probably remain for a year or more.

This edition’s music selections were selected with this in mind.

Thin Lizzy – The Boys are Back in Town

The Wallflowers and Jordan Zevon – Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Paul Simon – You Can Call Me Al

REO Speedwagon – Time For Me To Fly

Via: VideoSift

I like gadgets. I had been lusting over a new cell phone, and the fact that my phone was coming up on two years old was just gnawing away at me, like a persistant itch. I really wanted to replace it, but couldn’t really justify it to myself.

Then last night the wife sat me down to go over a stack of miscellaneous paperwork that had been piling up until I either a) commented on it, or b) acknowledged that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about it. Somewhere about mid-stack, there was a letter from Cingular telling me I could upgrade my phone for mere pennies, provided I signed up for another two years of service from them.

You have to understand that in my universe, the mere fact that the wife had saved this for me to look at was nothing less than an enthusiastic endorsement of my desire to get a new phone. So at lunchtime today, I wandered down to the Cingular store downtown. There I was helped by an impossibly young women whom we shall call “Brittany”. After a little discussion of what I was looking for in a cell phone, Brittany pointed to the ‘SYNC’ by Samsung. Although the SYNC was originally designed to be a music player, it had a beautiful color screen, a 2 Megapixel camera, and blazing fast data transfer rates. And it was thin.

Brittany began going through the necessary steps to switch over my phone number. The information on my SIM card would have to be transferred to the new SIM card. I made sure to ask whether my wife would be able to transfer her SIM card into my old phone, and I was assured she could. That was good because, even though our phones were identical, after two years of intense mother duty hers was showing some wear and tear.

The first hiccup arose when I tried to dial the phone to complete activating the renewed account. The recorded voice at the other end kept insisting that the number I was trying to activate was already active. We tried several times, and finally Brittany said she would handle it from the back room. Then I tried to swipe my debit card in the card reader, which immediately triggered some kind of startup routine. The card reader checked its internal memory, ran a diagnostic self-check of systems, started loading some important card-swiping software, then immediately crashed and went back into self-check mode. After I watched this cycle play out a couple of times, Brittany just ran my card as a credit card and I signed the slip.

With my beautiful new phone in my pocket, I grabbed an egg salad sandwich and went back to work. I wanted to call my wife from my new phone and tell her what I had done. Oddly, when I dialed her number, I got voicemail. Well, no matter, I would just call her from my office phone. I dialed her cell phone number – -

and my new phone started to ring.

It’s hard to describe the exact depth of horror I suddenly felt, as my new phone plaintively beeped away. One thing was clear: if I was dialing her number, and my phone was ringing, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Brittany!

I hotfooted it back to Cingular and looked frantically around the store for Brittany. She was nowhere to be seen. I was becoming desperate, and for the following reason: If my wife’s number was ringing my phone, then my wife’s cell phone, where ever it may be, was not working. And my wife would not know why.

I waited for another young woman to see me, and earnestly explained the situation. She looked at me dubiously, and called up my account on the computer. Then she put the phone down on the counter, picked up her extension, and dialed my wife’s cell phone.

Right on cue, my new phone started beeping. She did not look happy.

She said something like “We’ll have to get this straightened out” through clenched teeth, then vanished back into the back of the store with my phone. After a significant wait, she came back out with my phone, and a new SIM card.

“Okay,” she said, “Your phone is all set to go. This is a SIM card with your wife’s phone number on it. She will have to put it into her phone, then it will work fine.”

But what about all the phone numbers she has saved on her existing SIM card?

“She will have to go into a Cingular store, any Cingular store, and have them transfer it from the old SIM card to the new one. It should be no problem.”

No problem? No PROBLEM?!? My wife’s cell phone is her lifeline. She spends an absurd amount of time using it, either talking to her siblings, contacting the mothers of girls in her girl scout troop, conferring with the leader of our son’s scout troop, or any of a couple dozen other folks, all of whom she needed instant access to. And her idiot husband, just because he wanted a new toy, had not only succeeded in breaking her phone, but she was going to have to make an extra trip to the store to recover her address book.

It was not beyond the realm of possibility that she would want to castrate me. With some kind of rusty garden implement.

I left her a message on the answering machine, and sent her an email. Then I waited. When she finally called, late in the afternoon, she was rather curious as to why her phone had been reading “No Service” all afternoon. I told her the whole sordid story, and to my surprise, she wasn’t irritated at all. I think she was just relieved that there was a defined reason that her phone had died.

So she’s happy, and I’m happy. Want to see why I’m happy?

Here’s a pic I took with my old cell phone:

And here’s a pic I took this afternoon with my new cell phone:

Pretty cool, eh?

Via: VideoSift

A drunk walks into a seedy biker bar, sits down and orders a drink. After he downs it, he looks around the bar and spots three bikers sitting at a corner table. He gets up, staggers over to their table, leans over, looks the biggest, meanest, biker right in the face and says: “I went by your grandma’s house today and I saw her in the hallway buck naked. Man, she is one fine looking woman!”

The biker looks right back at him and doesn’t say a word. When he doesn’t jump up and wipe the floor with the drunk, his buddies stare at him in amazement.

The drunk leans in a little closer and says: “Then I got it on with your grandma and she is good, the best I ever had!”

At this, the biker’s buddies are starting to get really mad. One of them starts to stand up, but the biker puts his hand out to restrain him, still saying nothing.

The drunk leans in close enough that his breath was curling the biker’s nose hairs, and says, “I’ll tell you something else, sonny boy, your grandma liked it!”

At this point the biker slowly stands up, takes the drunk by both shoulders, looks him square in the eyes and says…

“Grandpa, go home. You’re drunk.”