cell phones

I've blogged before about my dislike for cell phones. My biggest beefs about them are people driving while using them, or rather, using them and attempting to perform something akin to driving, and having a 24/7 leash by which the world believes you at their beck and call.

Well for the last few days, stately Lumberyard manor has become cell phone dependent. We had a lightning strike near the house Friday, and while everything else seems to have survived unscathed, the home phone line did not. A call to AT&T left us believing it'd be fixed by Monday. When the wife called them Monday afternoon to find out why we still have no home phone line, they informed her it was fixed. She asked what part of fixed meant when you tried to call our house, you still got a busy signal, and when you turned on our phone, you still got no dial tone. The answer was, we'll get it fixed by....get this...Thursday. She started to ask if the technician who "fixed" the line tested it, by maybe...oh I dunno...calling the house and see if he got through. She could see that quickly turning into..."It'll be fixed by next Monday." Nothing good was coming out of that line of sarcastic questioning.

So we're using cell phones for our communication with the outside world, and I gotta tell ya...compared to a land line, they suck. When I use mine from time to time when I'm away from home, it doesn't really hit me. Now that I've been using nothing but a cell phone for several days, there's no comparison to a land line when it comes to quality of the conversation. There's all kinds of reception issues and words that get dropped out and sounding like you're in a tunnel that you just don't deal with in a home phone, and this from the company that claims more bars in more places. I wonder if they're talking drinking establishments, because they aren't delivering in the connection quality department.