Phone & Fernley

[kevin_standlee]

I left Newark this morning, got my hair cut at my regular barber in Fremont, bought coffee beans from Suju's Coffee across the street from where I used to live, and headed toward Nevada. I stopped at the Donner Summit rest area and noticed for the first time that there is an 800 m loop trail that intersects the Pacific Crest Trail and that made for a pleasant walk in one of the few places on today's trip that wasn't unpleasantly warm.

In Sparks, I went to the Verizon store to get a replacement telephone. I assume that my old phone has now been thrown in the trash once the person who picked it up discovered that it no longer works to make free phone calls and texts. After some discussion, the guy there found a simple phone that was just my type, except that they were out of them, and I had to head down to the other Verizon store, this one about a mile south of the Atlantis/Convention Center in Reno.

I had been scared to touch the actual service plan on my account because it was relatively inexpensive and all the new plans appeared to me to cost more. Furthermore, most of the other plans appeared to be aimed at people who spend every waking moment with a telephone taped to their ear gabbing at someone. I don't use a lot of minutes; I just want a simple phone so I can make and receive calls at need. They suggested that their prepaid plans with simple phones would save me $8-10/month over what I'm paying now. With some difficulty and multiple attempts, they were actually able to get one of their prepaid simple phones activated and my existing telephone number attached to it. The phone works; it can call other phones, and if you call my old number, the new phone rings. Unfortunately, because of the way it works, it appears that all of the existing online Verizon account information doesn't work anymore, nor have I as yet been able to create a new account on the old phone number, which they say doesn't exist. I'll give it a couple of days. I want to set the account up to automatically recharge itself (from one of my credit cards) on the prepaid plan without me having to go through the rigamarole of buying prepaid cards and typing them into the phone.

I found another good reason for buying the phone in Nevada over California besides wanting to have the tax benefit my adopted home state: California applies sales tax to the nominal retail price of the phone, not the actual price after all of the incentives. Nevada only taxes the actual amount you're charged net of discounts.

So after around $100 (including some accessories like a new case, and including the "upgrade charge" for moving my old phone number onto the new phone, I am once again online and if you have my phone number, you can call me again. If you happen to have left me voice-mail in the past two days, forget about it; I'll never get it because the new phone starts over from zero. Also, I'll have to start recreating my address book. Fortunately, the new phone comes with the feature that allows you to backup your address book online, so the next time I change phones (voluntarily or not), I won't have to worry about this.

Thanks to spending >2 hours running around Reno/Sparks dealing with Verizon, I didn't get home until nearly 8 PM. It is quite hot and will continue to be very hot through Wednesday, which is when we leave for Sacramento.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Glad you were able to keep your number. And you found a plan that will work for you.
Online back up of address books is always handy. Losing the address book feels like you are losing your mind. Not pleasant. Remind us at Westercon, and we can call you, hanging up after a ring or two, so you can capture our phone numbers.
And I will leave your phone number right here without change, next to a nice picture of you that the system picked up at some point.

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

I'm using a prepaid plan that works through Verizon, and the site that I use to buy minutes has an email-based method for auto-updating the phone balance so I don't have to type numbers in; however, that only works if I'm always buying $25, and I've found that I just don't make enough calls to spend $25 every 120 days, so I just go through the hassle of reminding myself to go login and buy a card, and then I think there's a link for doing the update. The problem is that since I only have to do it every 120 days, I don't always remember the exact procedure. If you want to take a look, I'm using a combination of services--pageplus handles the phone, and prepaidonline sells the phone cards. It's a little bit of a pain, but very very cheap.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

Glad you got the phone situations straightened out. I am thinking about a prepaid phone when I renew later this year due to wanting to save money if at all possible.

[retro-rider55.livejournal.com]

"You're fixing the phone, so the calls come in
And keep your time a squanderin', as it will go..."