I went to the Verizon kiosk at Cary Towne Center, after finding it on yp.yahoo.com.
After walking past the no less than seven cell phone carrier kiosks in the mall, I was told by Mall Information, that they no longer have a Verizon representative in their mall. Fortunately, she did know that the nearest one was “at Crossroads, right near the Bob Evans restaurant.”
At the Verizon store in Crossroads, I told the person greeting me at the door that I wanted to check to make sure my contract was in such a place that I was eligible for new phones, and she replied, “Let me send you to customer service over there. They can tell you, and that way you won’t have to wait in line for a sales person only to find out you’re not eligible.”
I waited for 10 minutes in the Customer Service line, while all of the people who would have been ahead of me in the “sales line,” were all served. When I finally did get served, the woman said, “Oh my god, yes; you’ve been eligible for new phones since 2004.” Time flies when you’re having good cellular service, I guess.
I went back to the greeter and told her I was eligible, and she said, “Oh, good, I’m glad you checked there so you wouldn’t have been waiting in this line for nothing.” Huh???
I got an extremely efficient sales person, Kate, who was very knowledgeable. So noticeably so that I said to her, “How long have you been working here?”
“Six years,” she said.
“It’s obvious,” I replied, “You definitely have it going on.”
I told her that I was very specific about what I wanted in my free phones, “I want a non-flip phone; I don’t care about a camera phone, e-mail, text-messaging, or music on my phone.”
She went to a case and got the only non-flip phone they offered, and when she tried to scan it, it wouldn’t recognize the code at first, and she said, “No one ever requests these phones.”
In the end, I was going to have to pay a total of $30 for those two phones. “Okay, how much is the most expensive flip phone that I won’t have to pay anything towards, then?”
She showed me the Motorola V325, and I took two of them for free, and renewed my contract for another two years.
When the screen came up to renew, it wouldn’t take the renewal at first, and Kate said, “Oh, that’s an old, cheap plan. It doesn’t want to renew it at that price.” She worked on it for a minute or so, and got it to take it.
“Is there any way on the Internet, or any other free way, to transfer our contact list from our old phones to this phone?”
She said, “Well, we have this $1.95-a-month service that allows you to transfer them, and manage them at any time, from the Internet, or we have a device that you can buy for $40 that allows you to do that, but nothing free.”
I replied, “Well, you know by now that I’m not going to pay for anything I don’t have to pay for. I’ll be keying in my phone numbers. Thanks.”
This whole transaction took me longer than I anticipated it taking, so I didn’t make my 3:30 appointment with Myra, the STC Newsletter Faculty Advisor. I’d called her, though, and she was expecting me at 4:00 instead of 3:30.
I would have actually arrived at about 3:40, if I didn’t turn into State at the entrance across from Avent Ferry, only to find I couldn’t turn right to go toward Carmichael. That construction is really getting old there, with way too many long, tedious detours around campus.
Myra and I had a great meeting, and I sense that we’re going to work very well together. I got the details of when the newsletter needs to go out, the tool (Microsoft Publisher, which I don’t know, but will easily pick up I’m sure) used to create/publish it, and the “rules” for content.
I was a little disappointed with the rules, but not surprised, as it’s a lot like technical writing in general — by the time you employ “STC’s content requirements,” “NCSU’s style guidelines,” and “print vs. online considerations,” it’s hard to be overly “creative.”
Robert and I had a healthy dinner, with my signature salad, along with a boiled chicken breast with some delicious Mango Habanero Sauce (compliments of my dear friend, Irene) on it.
From a recycled N&O paper I got in the “bin” at Helios last week, we did the word jumble and the crossword puzzle.
In the jumble, we struggled with the word “snugly” thinking that it should be “snuggly” as in the root word being snuggle instead of “snugly” as in the root word being “snug.”
After a short nap, we headed to dancing, where it was a fairly uneventful night. It wasn’t very crowded in the bar, and Carl reviewed “The Honky Tonk Twist,” for the lesson.
We met a guy named Matt, which I only mention because he’s going to factor into tomorrow’s blog entry. No, I’m not mind-reading, I’m devising this entry three days later.