Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

When Kayla was getting ready to leave today, she found where the strap on her purse that attached to the cell phone pouch had broken. That won't get the old phone back (and it's too late anyway), but at least it's clear what happened.

The rest of today's antics are in kayla_allen's journal, for which you will need to ask permission if you don't have access yet.

The reason that my employer-issued smartphone went smash a few days ago is that it slipped out of the belt pouch in which I was carrying it. That in turn was because the Velcro might have worn out, and because of the way the pouch hung on my belt. Lisa bought some supplies from Tandy Leather in Reno and worked on making better belt pouch.

( Bigger and Lower )

The new pouch seems to be working so far, but it needs to wear in a bit until we see how it behaves. Of course, if I would lose weight, there would be less of me hanging over the belt acting as a hazard to my phones.

My company smartphone slipped out of its holder on my belt this afternoon and landed hard on the pavement today, screen down. It spiderwebbed. The phone still looks like it's working. It rings when I call it, and makes tones I recognize, but the screen is so badly broken that I can't activate anything. I've filed a ticket with my employer to find out what to do next; however, there is a chance that I'll lose access to some things, including my work e-mail, because it depends on 2FA codes that are sent to that phone. If you possibly have been trying to use my work e-mail to contact me, you should use my personal e-mail, which is kastandlee followed by @ and gmail.com.

( Phone Fall Down Go Boom )

I hope it does not take as long to fix this issue as it did to replace my computer.

It occurred to me this morning that whoever picked up my dropped phone and started using it probably threw it away before I suspended service. That's because the phone was displaying about half charge that afternoon. (I'd meant to recharge it that evening and forgot; that's a pity because if I'd went to do that as soon as I got to the hotel, I would have realized that I'd dropped it between the van and the room and possibly been able to retrieve it before someone snarfed it up.) But on my old phone, the charge went slowly from 100% to 50% and then very quickly through the last half. The phone probably died of lack of charge, at which point they would have discovered that it was one of those old phones from the Bad Old Days where phone charger models changed every fifteen minutes, and where they apparently made a charger specifically for that model and that applied to no other model ever, because when I went to buy a second one a few months later, Verizon said, "They don't make that charger type anymore."

Anyway, the new phone uses micro-USB just like my smartphone, so all of the chargers and connectors work interchangeably, thank goodness. Also, the new phone has online backup for my contacts list, and I've set that up so that as I rebuild my contacts, I won't lose them again. And, since it's a pay-as-you-go $35/month phone, I've set it auto-pay so that I don't have to fret about remember to buy a phone card for it other than in the very unlikely case of exceeding 500 minutes in a month. (50 minutes is a rare high for me.)

Meanwhile, we're staying inside as much as possible, as the 40°C temps are deadly. It's about 30°C inside, which isn't fun but also isn't quite as awful. And the air conditioning works in the lifeboat travel trailer, so we're sleeping there. The refrigerator doesn't work, but the AC does.

I had assumed that my phone — not my company-issued smartphone, but my personal ordinary basic flip phone — had fallen out of my holster in my hotel room, but when I couldn't find it anywhere in the room when I got back after work this afternoon, I decided to write it off. I went to the same Verizon store where I'd bought it (about five or six years ago), but because I didn't have a password I forgot that I even had, they couldn't help me. I went back to the hotel and logged in to my Verizon account. (I had the password for that.) I checked the phone's usage. To my annoyance, I found that starting at 8:19 PM last night, a lot of calls started being made on my phone. None of them were very long, and none seem to be international, so I don't think I'm going to have a massive bill. (I'm still within the calling allowance.) 37 calls were made in total, running late last night and throughout today until about 6 PM. One of the numbers called (three times) was the front desk of this hotel. I went to the front desk and asked if they knew anything about a lost phone. (I'd checked yesterday morning as well.) The clerk there said he knew nothing. That's what all of the staff here say, no matter what you ask them, it seems.

Although I didn't have the "billing password" (I found it later), I was still able to suspend service on that number. That phone is, unfortunately, a write-off. I say unfortunately not because it was valuable (it was utterly obsolete and fully depreciated, you might say), but because now I've lost my entire contact list. So if you were in my phone contact list, you're gone, and I'll have to start all over again. Irritating, that is.

I assume that what happened was the phone fell out of my holster as I was getting out of the van last night, and someone here at the hotel picked it up and decided it was a free resource and started making calls. Given the look of some of the clientele here, I'm not surprised.

At this point, with the phone suspended (I checked by calling it; it has a suspended/disconnected service recording), there's no urgency in doing anything else until tomorrow. I have some early-morning errands in Fremont, but there's no need for me to wait around to do anything here. Once my errands are done, I can head home and stop by a Verizon store in Reno or Sparks and try to get a new basic (non-smart) phone there. I really don't need or want a second smartphone, you see. For my own personal phone, I can get along just fine with a basic phone, since I make and receive very few calls. I do want to have a phone again before Westercon, though, because that's one of the times I tend to need to be reachable on short notice. I also hope to get a phone without a built-in camera, although that may be nearly impossible, as almost ever model I've seen has a camera whether you want it or not.