Phones and MP3 players

Article = none , personal experiance.

How to take a ticked off customer and tick him off even more...

I had today off , so I went down to St. Laurent Shopping Center , to ....

St. Laurent Centre
Ottawa
K1K 3B8
Phone: 613-748-9283
Fax: 613-748-3784

... with my old clunker of a phone , a nokia bar phone (shaped like a bar of soap , no flip hinge or anything) that simply will not die despite the peanut butter in the jack for the head set that I never did buy, or the slight crack in the screen where my wife stomped on it once.
Can you put this phone on my account ? My regular phone is in the shop and I bought the regular with you and it has insurance that covers a loaner phone and everything.
No. It's a Virgin Mobile phone. Bell only puts bell phones on it's system , no one elses.
Probably I shouldn't mention that I (later on) called 611 on this virgin mobile phone and got a recorded message telling me to call Bell Mobility at such and such a number.
Well, can I have that loaner phone then ,the one that my insurance pays for ?
No you didn't send you phone back with us (because you refused ! You want me to wait while you special order some headphones and thats already been almost two weeks !) but if you give us a work order from Bell , then we'll do it anyways.
What a nice way to tell you to plick off, seeing as they know bell didn't give me a work order, just a courier receipt to say the courier had picked up my phone on such and such a day.
Well..you know my phone number and my account number, can't you just call Bell and get confirmation I"m not funning you ?
No. (No explanation why they can't call.)
All right , catch you later. Walk out of store.

Later on, I type in www.virginmobile.com , and it redirects me to some vigin mobile website with a rediculously long url and I type in my phone number. Doesn't exist. (I didn't remember the number by the way , I actually entered it into the phones contact list under my name so I'd never lose it unless I lost the phone, clever me).
No luck.
This is the part where I phone 611 on the phone, the universal number for technical support on all phones everywhere. (keep that in mind, 611 ...that comes in later on in this article). And instead of Virgin Mobile answering it's Bell Mobility. I start swearing at Bell and my hatred for them grows stronger.
Find a contact number on the virgin mobile page, and phone them up. Get their automatic system trying to get me to start up a new phone I just bought. Press 0 to get a live operater (yeah , keep in mind I pressed 0 ....there's a lot of not so secret codes in our society , arn't there ?) and I found out if you don't use your phone for 4 months they deactivate it. But thats ok , they'll reactivate it free of charge (you get a different number, and yes ! I did update my contact list with MY entery to reflect the new number the moment I stopped talking with them ! Arn't I so clever ? ) and even gave me 10$ credit for being such a good customer.
No one likes a deadbeat , and my difficulties with bell mobility were definately not virgin mobiles fault, so I whipped out my credit card and put 15$ on the account anyways , even though I know that at 30 cents a minute thats 75 min that only lasts 45 days , and I'm just not a talkative guy , most of that time is gonna expire before I use it. Call it a sign of support for virgin.
Side note. Did virgin deactivate the internet for me like bell refused ? No. Did virgin deactivate text messaging like bell refused ? No. Did virgin deactivate the xms radio like bell refused ? Irrelevatn , this phone doesn't have that. Does all this matter ? No ! It's a pay as you go phone. It's not gonna rack up my bill to some outragous amount. It's just gonna spend the 15$ (plus 10$ credit they gave me) and then stop. No weird bills !
Point one: I now have my own temporary phone , and at 10$ cheaper than the 25$ bell wanted to charge me for a loaner.
Point two: the losers trying to rip me off (bell and wirelesswave) didn't get a dime out of me. I hate when people rip me off. And I certainly hate giving them more money, that just encourages them to keep on ripping !

I had earlier checked out the price of a set of blue tooth headphones for playing music. If I could find a set at a reasonable price, it would completely bypass the non functioning jack that was only playing my songs in mono. Found one, 120$ plus tax. Yech.
Went into The Source, an electronics store. 60$ for an mp3 player, Zen Stone , and 20$ for some decent head phones.
Interestingly... they first suggested an iPod for 50$. But you have to download iTunes to use it. And iTunes is just a shell around your internet explorer. So the first thing it's gonna do is demand you get the latest and greatest internet explorer. And the internet explorer is going to insist on you getting all the security patches. The ones that usually break your system and cause any program that bill gates has decided he hates to mysteriously stop working.
Even worse, when xp first came out , a patch came out for win98. A patch that basically slowed down win98 and made it suck and stopped it from doing many of the things it usually did. And if you phoned Microsoft, you just got told to upgrade to winxp , they no longer suppoert win98. Deliberate , but perfectly legal , sabatage.
What do you want to bet that now that Microsoft is Vista happy , the lastest Xp patches sabatage it , and all they do is demand you upgrade to vista ?
Plus iPods had a bad reputation for giving you problems with copy right , and only buying from the itune store, and other insane vender lock "Only buy from us , not allowed to buy from anyone else" nonsense.
"No , I don't like iTunes." I told the clerk.
So he shifted from the iPod to the Zen Stone , for ten extra dollars. Ten dollars to avoid that nightmare was cheap, if you ask me.
Take my Zen Stone home, plug it into my linux machine (Ubunto 7.10) and it shows up like an extra hard drive on the desk top. Open it up and start putting music files into it.

'Droid Speak

In the first movie starwars, Luke Skywalker could speak directly to R2D2 without any translation. He apparently read the lights on the droid / robot and listened to the chirping noises it made, and he knew what it all meant. Totally cool ! What a neat science fiction concept. Give the robots a special langauge.

Umm.... maybe not so science fiction.

My Zen Stone has one (count it , ONE ) light on it. If it flashes red once , and then a pause, it means it's at 25% or less charge. Two red flashes its 50% , three it's 75%, and solid red it's fully charged. I know this because I read the instrution manual. Is there a display to tell you this ? Nope. Just that one little light. Oh yes, and it also flashes green to indicate something or other else, I didn't bother with that because I wasn't interested. Something about data transfer , but hey , I can see on my computer screen the progress of the data transfer so thats redundant.

Rember those first cell phones that flip open , and how every techie declared them to be star trek communicators come true ?

I think we're working on Droid Speak now.

Interperting that light is part of droid speak , isn't it ? You know the codes , but non technical people don't. They're not a secret , really , you just have to dig for them. And you know , getting caught in a computer system trying to solve your problem without letting you talking to a live human , and knowing that you can just press 0 and you 'll get one anyways ? Thats a little secret code that isn't obvious to everyone too , isn't it ? Isn't that also kind of like droid speak ?

And what about Emily ? Bell Canada's Artificial Not-So-Intelligent program that answers the phone and can actually understand the spoken word. Knowing that if you say "Agent" , or just start swearing into the phone, you'll get a live operator, that's another secret code too isn't it ? Along with 611 (technical assistance any phone) , and 411 ( directory assistance any phone ) and 0 for the operator.. these codes may be well known , but they're not written down on the handset , are they ? Unless you crack open a manual (telephone book) and look around, (or somone tells you ) they're not at all obvious.

Droid Speak. It's not that far away. Some might say we actualy have a simple version of it right now , it simply hasn't been formally recognized as such.