Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > July > 07 > Entry
How about a phone that works?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the limits to which we’ll put up with the inconveniences of technology — when things break down, crash or simply don’t work the way they’re supposed to.
Long beyond the days when the slightest unforeseen letdown in a product meant taking your receipt and marching right down to the Montgomery Ward’s for a refund, we’ve evolved to the point where dropped cell-phone calls, Windows Blue Screens of Death and automated telephone menus that point you to purgatory (where no live voices dwell) are a matter of course.
We pay, more than we ever have, for devices and services that rarely work exactly as they’re meant to. Twenty years of personal computers that crashed, lost our documents and couldn’t decipher word-processing documents composed on other computers’ operating systems.
The one device we let slide the most? Cell phones.
We lose calls constantly, have conversations that sound like they’re taking place on an airport tarmac and endure very … very … slow Internet features.
For the privilege, we pay high monthly bills full of mysterious and myriad fees that would send a tax accountant into fits of rage and upgrade our phones constantly, signing ridiculous one- or two-year commitments to stay loyal to the same phone company that’s giving us such shoddy service.
Ah, but it’s easy to blame the cell companies. They’re charged with deploying new technologies over a vast array of handsets and making sure all those phones work over enormous coverage areas. It’s not an easy task.
But the cell phone business is still one where the massive amount of cutthroat competition among the major carriers still hasn’t resulted in what would be the Holy Grail for most casual cell phone users: a phone that never drops a call.
The other day, I had a freelancer call me at work from a cell. The call dropped. They called again. It dropped again. The third, fourth and fifth times they called, I couldn’t even hear their end of the conversation. On the sixth try, they explained that their cell phone wasn’t working properly. By the 10th call, we decided to migrate over to e-mail.
Who puts up with that?
We all do. Because a non-call-dropping cell phone doesn’t exist and no carrier will promise to sell you a phone that will deliver that kind of service. The best they’ll do is refund the cost of the dropped call, a process that requires another potentially dropped call to make the refund request.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, I live in New Braunfels, and the call phone service out here is pretty awful.
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