I upgraded my iPhone yesterday. I’d put it off as long as I could. The screen was cracked, the battery no longer held a charge, the port to plug in the charging cable was worn out and the cable would simply fall out if not positioned correctly. Not to mention the phone itself kept getting slower and slower, often needing to pause and reflect on whether or not it really wanted to open an app or simply return to the home screen. But, I am a creature of habit and if it works well enough, then I feel no need to replace something. I’m not one to be enticed by shiny new electronics. Give me stable and functional and I will stand by your side. Or at least let you continue to ride along with me in a sweaty pocket. In fact, this is the first phone in several that didn’t die by salt water. One of its predecessors died on a beach in Nassau, the other from an accidental plunge off a dock in Corpus Christi. I tried to kill this one diving in Key West two years ago, but by that time Apple had grown wiser and stopped selling me phones that couldn’t survive being fully submerged in the ocean.
And to Verizon’s credit, they’ve been telling me for a while that it’s time. Time to let the old go and embrace the new. But I resisted and resisted. Until I finally went in because they kept offering me a new phone for $5 a month. As it turned out, they also changed around their packages and I was able to toss my Netflix account into the bundle which after everything was figured was $5 less than my old bill. Which means on the balance of cell phone plan scales, the new phone cost me absolutely nothing.
But things are never that easy are they?
The old phone is still sitting beside the new phone on my desk. What was supposed to be a simple 30 min syncing process to transfer everything from the old to the new repeatedly ended in failure. Everything seemed fine at the Verizon store where they got the new phone set up and using bluetooth to copy all my photos and and apps and messages and all of the million little other things that cause that little black mirror to integrate so deeply into a life. I was told to go home and just keep the phones together and when they were done, the new phone would be a mirrored copy of the old.
Perfect.
Not so much.
I spent the next 12 hours trying to sync, abandoning the phone to phone and then going to the cloud which did in fact work, minus syncing any of my apps. And you never really fully appreciate how many apps you have until you have to manually go through and redownload them one by one and then try to figure out your username and password for each. By the end, I had all the apps loaded, got my e-mail accounts setup, my photos and videos had synced, but for whatever reason it didn’t sync any text messages from the past year.
I was less than thrilled.
But whatever, there are more tragic things.
So it finally came down to that Netflix account. It was now included in my phone package, but I was already paying for it through Netflix so I needed to get my billing updated so I wasn’t getting double charged each month. The guy at the Verizon store told me it was an easy switch in the Verizon app, but finding that answer on my own seemed to be above my paygrade so I called the Verizon customer support. A girl with a sweet sounding voice answered and followed her script word for word through our introduction. I then told her what I was trying to do.
She asked me how much I was currently paying for Netflix because Verizon offered bundled packages that could save me money.
Wait what?
I explained again that I already signed up to get the streaming package through Verizon and I was just trying to update my billing.
She told me that I was already signed up and would be billed for the streaming package next month.
It was at this point, that I realized as sweet as she sounded, she simply wasn’t listening to anything I was saying or deviating from whatever script she was reading.
I asked if there was someone else I could talk to who might be better suited to help me.
She asked if I would be interested in a bundled streaming package.
I told her I was just going to hang up and go back to the store.
I hung up.
I called Netflix. Within a couple of minutes their text support guy walked me through updating my information on the Verizon App.
Just to say that again. The guy at Netflix solved my Verizon issue.
A few minutes later my phone rings. The caller ID says it’s Verizon Support. I let it go to voicemail.
It was the same girl still reading from the script, saying it sounded like our call got disconnected and this call may be monitored or recorded for quality and training purposes.
