Easy? Never.

I'm always the optimist. Glass half-full kind of thing. Even when past experience has told me that, no matter what the instruction booklet says, getting a computer to cooperate with a new modem will take hours instead of steps 1-4, I still hold out and hope--no, believe--that this time, it'll be just that easy.



I'm always wrong.



I've had the Crack for four weeks now. Last night I learned how to check my voice mail (Hi, Liz! You did call me to tell me that you're engaged, just like you said you did. I'm sorry I doubted you.). Since we're leaving for Florida in a couple of hours, yesterday was the deadline to make sure the stupid thing would actually "tether" to my laptop so we can get online while we're in Florida. As usual, I'd tried a few times and when it didn't work, I just put it off.



After work yesterday, I spent over 3 hours at the AT&T store. I am loving AT&T. Every time I walk in, someone immediately asks if they can help. Ntelos evidentally didn't believe in customer service; if you remember, I would wait up to 90 minutes without being spoken to or asked to wait a bit. Not at AT&T.

I foolishly procastinated trying to tether the laptop and phone until the day before we leave for Florida (1 hour and 25 minutes now!), because the booklet shows four very simple steps (the fourth being "click on the CONNECT button") and I was so sure it would be that simple. I know better. I never believe that little voice that says, "you idiot, you know it'll take three hours to get it to work, and only then after you have the help of two phone techs and an hour of on-the-phone-with-customer-service (the tech guy, not me) to discover that my phone would not connect. Would. Not. Yeah, it's a refurb, that's the only way I could afford one. For some reason, they frequently won't cooperate with tethering. So he reset the phone. That didn't work.

I was tired, but I couldn't get upset at all the time it was taking because these guys were trying everything they knew to make it work. Finally, after the store closed, they said that the phone is defective, and they'll send a new (refurb) one to me. Since we'll be in Florida, and it was too late to get it to me today, they're sending it to my daughter's house. It should be there tomorrow. All I have to do is pack up the old phone, slap on the postage return sticker that they emailed me, and drop it in a mail box after I get the new (refurb) one.

I was floored. I've never had service like that with Ntelos. I had to argue with them for months to get my name changed on my bill after I remarried. It took three billing cycles--and three trips into the non-service store--to get my niece's phone line separated from mine, and they still didn't want to do it. Fortunately I saved every freaking contact that I had with them about these issues and finally they fixed things.

So. Once the new (refurb) one is here, all I have to do is link it to the laptop, open the communications manager, and click "connect". It will work.

I know it will.

Ha!

I am now a mo-bile blogger.

You can see how busy I am right now. I'm sure the deluge will start any second. XL has already sent a handful of pages to be copied for her students. They'll wait a while.

It makes me feel a little better.

A weekend in (almost) paradise

On the drive to Richmond Friday afternoon, we lucked out. The clouds parted and the sun came out. And the hotel had a pool, which was closed since it's after Labor Day, but that apparently meant they no longer skim off the bugs, so we sat on the edge and dangled our legs when we got too warm, lounged on the chaises, drank (Starbucks or water, as the case may be), read, and talked. Saturday was wonderful. Hot, in the 90s, which felt so good after the cool, dreary week we'd been through.

Our room was beautiful. It actually had a partition dividing the bedroom from the living room, and in the middle, on a swivel, was a 42" high-def tv. Now, we'd never seen HDTV before, as one of us didn't want to pay the extra $5 a month for it although she HAS an HDTV and the other two of us don't have them at all, and it was a revelation.

We all hate sports. We are blessed with a dad who never followed anything that involved throwing, catching, or hitting balls, so we grew up in a sports-free house. I'm fortunate enough to be married to a man who doesn't like sports.

But this past weekend, we only watched high-def channels. Outside of HBO, The Weather Channel, CNN, and something called Universal TV (I think), there wasn't much on that was high-def. So we watched a lot of CNN and, God help us, sports.

That doesn't mean I'll ever watch them again. But we could see every blade of grass. The colors were incredibly bright. Wrinkles on faces were unfortunately very visible. We decided that we'll never allow our photos to be shown on an HDTV, even though this weekend there was a hookup for a laptop (which I no longer have anymore) (but Joan does) and we could have looked at our pictures of Peter Cooper in high-def.

But that would have been just plain mean. And painful.