In these times, everyone seems to take technology for granted. As Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” And so, when a tropical storm hits Florida, and people start losing electrical service, and phone service, and internet connectivity, and so on, well, it’s enough of a disaster that the governor starts asking for federal aid and the TV talking heads start reporting from our locale. Last week, we had a similar technology catastrophe to deal with on a personal level - our daughter’s cell phone stopped working.

First, some background: Kate is 21, a senior at Florida State, with her own apartment in Tallahassee, about 150 west of here. During her last visit, at the beginning of this month, she and I both got new cell phones. A few days after she went back to Tallahassee, she IM’d me to say that her new cell phone would not send or receive calls or text messages. She had charged it overnight, and she noticed the phone was a bit warm. It showed full battery and full signal, would take photos and display contacts, but was useless as a communication tool. This is the type of thing a 21-year-old daughter calls her dad for - tech support issues. So, while we exchanged notes via IM, I called Verizon and spent about an hour on the phone with them, acting as an intermediary as they tried to help my daughter “re-program” her phone. No luck. They escalated the call to the next level (maybe I should have done that … Kate, I’m transferring you to your grandfather … ). But the next level guy was useless, and finally said she needed to go to a Verizon store. Could have guessed that an hour ago.

So Kate finds a friend to take her to a local Verizon store, explains what happened, and they give her a replacement phone. Same model (LG), works fine in the store. She takes it home, leaves it to charge overnight, and the next morning, the problem occurs again - hot phone, good power and signal indicators, no service in or out.

Back to Verizon they go. En route, the phone starts working again. As Harry Chapin sang in Operator, “Isn’t that the way they say it goes?” Well, Verizon is not as cooperative this time, and they want to charge her $20 to change phone models. Well, it’s time again for Dad-to-the-rescue. I speak to the people there, work some Dad-type magic, and convince them that, since she could go online and obtain several Verizon phones for free, the Verizon store shouldn’t charge anything. They insist they have to charge for the new (Samsung) phone, but say they’ll put a $25 “inconvenience credit” on our account. Works for me.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for Kate. The new Samsung works on the way home, dies in the apartment. By this time, we’re thinking there are some kind of power spikes happening in the lovely student slum building in which she resides, but they don’t affect her computer, or her TV, or her microwave, or any of her friends’ phones. This adventure has been going on for several days now, and on Friday night, she is at her wits end. Saturday morning, Sue and I decide it’s time for Mom-and-Dad-to-the-rescue, and we make an unplanned drive to the scene of the crime.

Have you ever popped in unannounced on your allegedly adult children? The young man who answered the door was very friendly and welcoming, and we chatted while we waited for Kate to finish in the shower (he’s a friend, and was crashing on the couch - really). When she came out, the “What are you guys doing here?” was classic. So first, we (read that to mean Sue) testing the electrical outlets. Nothing unusual. We took Kate to the management office and asked them to send in an electrician to be sure. We tried our cell phones, and they worked fine (but we didn’t plug them in - no sense risking complete technological armageddon). And then we all headed to the Verizon store in the mall once again.

But, lo and behold, the phone started working again on the drive out there. So we shopped a bit, and Kate stopped into Verizon to let her good friends there know that her phone was now functional. Until that night. When we got back to the apartment, the disease returned. Didn’t even have to plug it in this time. My phone worked fine, as did Sue’s. But Kate’s was apparently possessed.

So, on Sunday, we tried again. This time, we went to a non-mall Verizon store, and found a very helpful tech guy named Mike. Mike gave her a second Samsung phone. Same issues. He switched her to a Motorola model, and we headed back to the valley of death once again. As soon as we turned into the parking lot, the phone stopped working. Now, how is it possible that this happens only on Kate’s phone, when ours (also Verizon, of course) work fine? We called Mike, who admitted to being completely stumped, and said we’d have to call Verizon tech support and have them work on it.

So that’s what we did. They said we’d hear back in a day or two, and, having left a little to be desired in the Mom-and-Dad-to-the-rescue department, we headed for home. But in all this trouble-shooting work, we had started to zero in on the cause. It obviously was not the phone, or the power in the apartment, or Verizon service in the area. It had to be something in the way Kate’s particular account was set up within the Verizon system. And so we waited to hear something.

Monday - nothing. Tuesday - around noon, I decide to make a follow-up call. Armed with our ticket number, I get to a representative who very sweetly tells me nothing of value. Yes, she sees the ticket, but it doesn’t show any additional entries. But it’s been assigned to a department, even though there’s no indication of that in the record. These things can take 7-10 days. She can’t look any deeper to find out which department might have it, and there’s no one else I can talk to, because she’s the highest level of support that talks to customers (now, there’s a policy that APPX Software could adopt!). The next part of the conversation was amusing:

“Are you there with your daughter?”
“No, I’m 150 miles away.”
“Can I call her?”
“Well, that’s exactly the problem.”
“Does she have another number I can reach her on?”
“No. That’s why we were hoping to get this resolved.”

And on and on. Finally, I decided to see if Kate was available through IM. She was. Sweet Techie asked me to tell Kate to turn on the phone. Kate did. Sweet Techie said she’d try to call her. Kate IM’d, “It works!” Sweet Techie went through a few more tests, and we all became convinced that the problem was finally resolved. And, knock on simulated woodgrain plastic, it has not reoccured in the three days since.

So what was the problem? Apparently, if a Verizon phone can’t pick up a strong Verizon signal, it will automatically switch to an alternate, usually Alltel. That happens seamlessly, and without roaming charges, or at least it should. But for some reason, Kate’s plan definition was blocking that. I don’t know why her plan defiinition was any different than ours, since we’re all on the same account. But her phone didn’t like the signal it found in that particular location, nor did it find any other that would be acceptable. So it kept searching, which, as a side effect, caused the phone to get hot.

How did they fix it? We don’t know. Perhaps some master techie looked into it on Monday, and made some adjustments to their tower or their signal in that part of Tallahassee. Or maybe some master techie cleaned up some bug in Kate’s record that caused the problem. If either of those scenarios took place, they only dropped the ball by not putting anything in the record or calling us to report the solution. I think, actually, that it was Sweet Techie herself who, after some gentle badgering by Dad-to-the-rescue, might have opened the record and discovered a bad specification. She never told us that, though, so the true diagnosis and solution both remain a mystery.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Al. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.