Only in Utah....

I thought about sharing a snippet of this experience in my facebook status, but I decided it was too long, so I suppose I'll put something here.

This weekend, I had the chance to go home over the holiday. I'll spare the details and hopefully get more pictures and information from my short vacation soon. Among other things, I got a new cell phone. The old one that I had was beat. I was none too gentle with it, but it was practically indestructable anyway. And during it's final months, it was held together with neon blue duct tape. I was fortunate enough to have parents that love me and I convinced them to let me get a nice phone. I have to pay the required internet service fee every month which sucks because I carry my laptop around campus and get free wi-fi whenever and wherever I want! That's the only thing that my mom and dad and I don't like. But I really like the phone. I plan on keeping it for a looooonnnggg time.

So this evening I was playing with some of the gadgets trying to figure it all out and I got a notice: "Initial Programming Required." I was confused, so I called verizon customer service to figure out the problem. I entered my phone number, my password, told them what I needed, and finally was connected to a real person in tech support. The funny thing was, he was confused as to why I had to sort of re-activate my phone. It worked all day yesterday and today but it just changed its mind I guess. Through the strictly business converstation he made a speech mistake and just threw it off and said it was late and he still had quite a few hours to go. I somewhat sympathize with telemarketers; I was in the business for about two or three weeks and I hated every minute of it and I know that the people on the other end didn't like me all that much either. Anyway, still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery, he asked me if I was still in Blackfoot, where the phone was purchased and activated. I told him that I was in Blackfoot yesterday, obviously, but I was currently in Provo, Utah. "Oh really?" he said, "I'm in Salt Lake!" Funny how that works, isn't it? We ended up having a short conversation about BYU and Utah and Idaho and the U and college and even ice cream... it was kinda nice and I could tell it made him a little happier. We actually talked for about 20 minutes or more I think, not including about the phone. He did explain that changing location affected my phone, because in Idaho I was using Alltell signals through Verizon, but in Provo, as he said, back in civilization, I was going just off Verizon towers. Made sense to me. So he gave me a quick number I could dial on my cell phone and even told me exactly which options to take to get it all fixed. Good customer service!

I of course was pleased to get my phone all dandyfull and just the way I like it, but it also brightened my night a little too to have just a casual, relaxed converstion with someone else. So, somewhere in the Verizon technical support staff, I guess I have a friend :)