Rebecca does not do well with anything electronic. She has been through innumerable laptops, CD players, stereos, TVs and hair straighteners (not exactly electronic, but she’s had at least four). I am loath to trust her with any device that has a plug. Come to think of it, I don’t think she has any lamps in her bedroom. But I digress. She has been reporting the slow, ugly demise of her cell phone over the last few weeks. First the antenna broke off. Then reception started to get fuzzy. And finally, it stopped working altogether. It should be noted that sometime between the poor call quality and the loss of life, it may, just *may*, have come into contact with the creek that runs behind the neighbors’ houses.

So off we trot to the Sprint store, because there is no indication on their web site of what to do about a broken phone. The girl at the store looked at the phone, opened the back of it, made a squinched-up face that would indicate she had found something extremely distasteful in there (on the order of squirming maggots or Andy Dick), and informed me that there was water damage to the phone and the warranty would not cover repairs. She checked to see if we had purchased insurance on the phone (this must have pre-dated the time after which we started buying a separate policy on every item we get for Rebecca), which we had not. The only option, according to her, was to buy a new phone at the full price (FULL PRICE!) of $250 because we were not adding a new line to the contract already in place. I asked her if that was the only choice available through Sprint and she assured me it was. We, of course, declined this magnanimous offer and chose instead to pay the cancellation fee ($150) and go look for another carrier.

Rebecca had already decided that she wanted to switch to T-Mobile (hmmm, could this lengthy terminal telephonic illness have been a ploy to make the change?). She and I have Sprint coverage and frequently cannot use our phones at home, getting barely half a bar worth of signal strength. My husband and Caitlin have T-Mobile phones and their answer to “Can you hear me now?” is always yes. We drove to the mall to visit the T-Mobile store where Rebecca picked out a new phone (free) and we set up the new account ($35 activation fee), transferring her old number to T-Mobile. The moral of this story: no matter which cell phone carrier you use, it’s an expensive pain in the ass to get a new phone.

One other note and then on to other matters. While signing up at T-Mobile they had to have me call Sprint to get my account number. When I informed the Sprint phone woman that I was going to be transferring the number, she wanted a reason and I explained about the economics of buying a new phone vs. getting a new carrier. She responded that she'd "be happy to work with me on the price of a new phone". I suggested that perhaps Sprint would have kept my business (really Rebecca's business, since I am keeping my cell service with Sprint) if the Sprint store woman had made the same offer. Sprint phone woman sniffed, "Oh she's just in sales and there's nothing we can do about that". I suppose there never is.

Movies: Garden State. Zach Braff wrote, directed and stars in this story of a young man who has lived much of his life in a medicated fog, suffering from an unspecified, poorly diagnosed condition. His mother’s death prompt his return to New Jersey, where for 4 days his “vacation” from pills allows him to rove through a journey filled with high school friends who have become grave-robbing gravediggers, a fast food Renaissance Faire knight, a man who is exploring the infinite abyss of a newly discovered canyon, and a young woman who will force him to examine the randomness of his life. This film made me think of Lost of Translation, the way the movie drifted along, but in a distinctly purposeful manner. It was, perhaps, too neatly tied up at the end – I preferred Bill Murray’s whispered message that left us wondering what the return to LA would bring.