My Theory on Drivers With Expensive or Large Cars

I drive over a bridge on my way to work, a bridge that is currently under construction. The result of the construction is a reduction from two lanes to one. Over the course of the construction, folks have learned to to stay in the right lane on the road approaching the bridge to avoid having to merge in.

For the two miles leading up to the bridge, I observe the other cars and I know which ones will ignore the now generally accepted behavior of remaining in the right lane and zip up the empty left lane only to force their way in ahead of the line of cars: drivers of expensive cars(BMW, Saab, Audi) and gigantic cars (Escalades, SUVs, Jeeps). Yes, these are not always mutually exclusive. We civilized drivers sit back, sigh and add on the extra time to our commute. Occasionally there is a rebel who refuses to let the large or expensive car in. I applaud these folks, however it never lasts long. By definition, we in the right hand lane are the polite, the ones who realize the world doesn't revolve around us.

I've often thought that the kind of car you drive is a reflection on your personality. Trusty Civic: practical. Mercedes: trying to prove something to others (especially if you're leasing). What does driving an expensive or large car say about the driver and do their actions live up to that reflection? Here is the impression I have of drivers of large and/or expensive cars: they think they own the road. Everyone else is just in their way. They probably think we in the right lane are naive and silly, waiting our turn. They are too important to wait (or care about how much gas they are burning, but that is a subject for another post). Well I'm not impressed.

I could be wrong about all this and they could just have several kids and driving with them in the car has pushed them over the edge.

Full disclosure: I am a Mini Cooper driver

Verizon Wireless Does Not Want Me to Have a Cell Phone

This is the true story of how I spent almost an entire day attempting to purchase a cell phone from Verizon and was thwarted at almost every turn.

Background:  

• My lovely Motorola Droid went missing 4 days ago (Last seen on my desk at work.  It's somewhat incomprehensible that someone took it, and yet it's no where to be found).  
• The phone is 7 months old and I am 7 months into a 2 year contract
• I do not have the insurance 

At first I could hardly believe the phone was gone and was of the opinion that the phone would re-appear.  However, I deactivated the day it went missing just in case.   While on the phone with Verizon, they sadly informed me (well sad for me, not sad for them) that because I did not have insurance and I wasn't yet eligible to upgrade my phone for the reduced (ahem.. sane) amount, I would be paying full retail price to replace the phone.   The Motorola Droid's full retail price (last Tues.) was $529.   Let's just say there is no way on God's green earth I would be paying $529 for a phone.   The representative then mentioned it would be possible to purchase a pre-owned Droid for a far more reasonable, but not thrilling $280.  I specifically asked him:  could a pre-owed phone be purchased in a store (that way I wouldn't have to wait for shipping).  He replied yes, but not all stores may have the Droid pre-owned in stock.  Fair enough.  Because I really hoped the phone would show up, I declined this nice offer to purchase the pre-owned phone.    



The following day, the phone did not appear.  I sadly reactivate my old, complete piece of crap, non-smart phone just so I have a phone.



That night I went to a 'Verizon Kiosk' at BJ's just to look at the phones.  In my (I now realize delusional) mind, I was thinking if I could buy a Droid pre-owned, I could by other phones pre-owned.. perhaps a Droid Incredible.   I look at the phones, I chat with the salesman... explaining my situation.  He, also, informs that I will have to pay full retail price. He also mentions that the Droid 2 is coming out the very next day.  Interesting.. I had no idea.  Can I see one?  No.  They are in the kiosk, but can't be unveiled until the following day.  Then I ask him if he has any pre-owned phones.  He says, oh no... not at the kiosk.  You will have to go to a Verizon store.  I gaze up at the large Verizon sign above us, but let it go. 



2 more days go by and the phone does not appear.  My co-workers have been trying to find me deals, but nothing interesting has come up.  It's Ebay or the $280.  Ebay makes me nervous:  do these phones really work?  Are they stolen?   What if it breaks later?   The prices on Ebay hover in the $200 - $250 range.  Not enough savings to make losing the Verizon warranty worthwhile to me. 



So today I step out on what I think will be a quick errand to an actual Verizon store to see if they have any pre-owned phones.   I arrive in the store, explain my plight.  They look me up in the computer and tell me I have to pay full retail price.  Really?   He says this is a 'small store', so they do not have pre-owned phone, but a larger store would. He looks it up in the computer and says that he can order me pre-owned Droid for $280.   I decline this because I'd really rather find a store with a pre-owned phone so I can ditch the piece of crap today.



I then call a few Verizon stores.   None of them seem to have pre-owned phones.  I'm sensing a pattern here.  I don't think these stores have pre-owned phones at all (or there is a demerit for selling them).   This is when I start to get irritated.



I go out to my car and decide to just call Verizon wireless and order the pre-owned phone.  By the way, you can not order pre-owned phones online for some reason.   I call explain my story again and am again told I will have to pay full retail.  So I say when I last called, they said there was a possibility of buying a pre-owned phone.   I am put on hold for a long time.   The rep returns and says:  I'm so sorry, but the Droid isn't part of our pre-owned program.  Umm... say what?   I inform him that I was just in a store and they told me they could order a pre-owned one for me.   He asks what store and I tell him.   I am put on hold once again.  He returns and says no, the store was mistaken.. they must have been looking at an old list.   Could they really be this disfunctional?   The rep continues and says the only phone available is the Devour and something else I'd never heard of.   Hmm...  I reply:  well, I guess I'll have to buy it on Ebay then.   The rep coughs and says: oh!   Let me look on one more list. I'm on hold one more time.   He returns and still says no (but really, if there was another list why did he wait until I threatened Ebay to look at it?).   I say ok.. bye.    As I was sitting outside an Apple store, I began calculating how much it would cost to just ditch the Verizon contract and buy an iPhone, even if you can't really make calls from it.   Sadly, this was cost prohibitive.



So I decide to just buy the cheapest possible smart phone because I refuse to give Verizon any more money than necessary. I already know this is the LG Ally and I know the phone is $369 on the Verizon site.   I refuse to return to the first 'small store' I went to because I don't want to reward them for giving me bogus information.   The was a Best Buy near by, so I went to their Verizon kiosk.  I walk in and quickly look at the phones.  The LG Ally was a remarkable $499.  My mouth hung open.  How stupid does Best Buy think people are?  $130 more than Verizon charges?   The usual pushy Best Buy sales person approaches me and asks if I need any help.  My mouth still open, I just glare at him and he backs away slowly.  I storm out of Best Buy. 



The only Verizon like store near by is the kiosk at BJ's.  Yes, the very first place I went 3 days prior.  I don't want to reward them, either, but now getting late and I'm beyond irritated.  I cruise in.  I really just want to see if the LG Ally is $369 there or if that is an online price.   Naturally, the same employee is there.  He says to me:  finally ready to buy?   How does he even remember me?   He then, bizarrely, tries to sell me on a net book.  I say:  that is somewhat large for a cell phone, yes?    The LG Ally is indeed $369 there, so I say I will take that.   He looks me up in the computer and says:  oh, you have a contract.  Yeah, we can't sell you anything full retail if you have a contract.  We can only sell to people who are starting new contracts.  You need to go to a 'large store'.  Is this a joke??   I told you my situation 3 days ago!  You said I have to buy full retail.  You didn't say I couldn't do it at your kiosk.   Why did he spend 20 min. trying to sell me something the first time I was there??   How does one know which stores are 'large'.   I'm beginning to think there is no way for me to actually buy a phone from Verizon while in my situation.



I briefly consider going to a place called 'Wireless City' near my house, but as they are merely an 'authorized reseller' I have doubts about whether they can do anything for me, plus when I had trouble with my charger a few months ago, the told me my only option was to buy a new one which was completely false.



I return home and just order online.   Of course the site times out and I have to start the order again.  After I submit the order, I notice it appears as if it made my contract month to month (because who else would be paying full retail price)?    How much do you want to bet that somehow that goes through and they bill me $350 dollars for ending my contract?? 



I have no optimism.  This is the same company that nearly pushed me over the edge with internet access issues. See my rant on that one here.



** Update **
20 min. after I finish writing this post, I received an email from my credit card company that they believe the charge to Verizon is fraudulent. It came through as "Phone Service". Maybe I'm just not meant to have a phone, period.

** Update 2 **
Thinking about this a bit more, there is a possibility that the Droid 2 coming out when it did may have impacted the availability of a pre-owned Droid. The Droid is no longer available for sale anywhere. Not that anyone from Verizon told me that. If they had mentioned that the launch of the Droid 2 a mere day away would mean I could no longer buy a Droid when I first spoke to them on Tuesday, I probably would have bought it then. Since on Weds. I could buy a brand new Droid, but on Thurs. I could not there must be new Droids in boxes in stores all over the place. If you're not going to sell them to the public, why can't I buy one for a reduced price? The timing of this is something that could only happen to me. Just like when my laptop died 3 days before Vista came out and there was literally not a laptop to be bought until the date Vista launched. The torture of having an early Vista machine, I will spare you.

** Update 3 **
When my credit card company sent me the email saying they thought the charge was fraudulent, I called them up and said: I charged it, put it through. Over 48 hours later I received an email from Verizon saying the order was on hold because my credit card was declined. Are you fucking kidding me? My level of irritation is off the charts. Who screwed up: the credit card or Verizon. In either case, why did it take 48 hours for them to inform me of this? So I bought a Droid on eBay.. I'm nervous about it, but I just can't give Verizon any money right now.

More Proof I'm Insane

Amongst my Twitter travels I encountered someone working on an #iTunesZero project.  The point being to listen to all the songs on your iPod at least once.   My eyes grew large.  YES!  I should do this.  I often feel guilty seeing the play count for my music as blank, 0 doesn't display in iTunes, blank.. null.  Music should be loved, not sitting on a hard drive with 0 plays. 

Here where this idea intersects with crazy:  my iTunes library includes 4,853 items for a total run time of 13 days and 52 minutes.   Due to catastrophic hard drive failure last year, I couldn't (or didn't know how to) import play counts from prior to that time.  Result:  there are 3,881 songs that iTunes considers unplayed.   Obviously, this is way.   I listened to many, many of these songs on various iPods and even in other formats in the (gasp) pre-iPod era (yes, youngsters, the iPod did not always exist).

But yet, I still think this is an idea worth pursuing, though it may take me the rest of my life (do you know how long it's going to take me to get through the Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones trifecta?  Do you know how much I am going to enjoy doing so?).   So for a couple of days I've been plugging in the iPod to my Bose iPod dock (just a plug because I love this toy so much, well worth the money) and start playing my smart playlist (where plays = 0).   So far I'm loving this project because it's an amazing walk down memory lane, but I'm also learning a few things: 

- I own music I had no idea I owned
- Stevie Nicks had a really bad, cocaine fueled, not reigned by Lindsay Buckingham, period
- I'm not sure the Wallflowers were ever really necessary
- Faith Hill holds up remarkably well
- I had forgotten how brilliant Aimee Mann is
- I should spend more time listening to Billie Holiday
- Tori Amos has an entire record of cover songs that I apparently bought, but have no memory of
- Counting Crows:  all that 90's angst.  Cheer up already.   Yet, it's still fantastic stuff
- There are some songs I really don't ever need to hear again and I'm getting them off my iPod
- I could listen to Buffalo Tom every day. 


Because I've been using shuffle play so far, it's a crap shoot what I've heard so far, so this is all I've got for you, but I'm fascinated to see how this goes.

Survival of the Fittest?

Today I finally got around to reading the latest issue of The Atlantic (one of my favorites despite changing it's name from the Atlantic Monthly and moving from Boston to DC - why?!).   The cover story's hysteria of course jumps out:  The End of Men (How Women are Taking Control of Everything) by Hanna Rosin.   A tad dramatic, The Atlantic.  But after all, this is the magazine that prints Caitlin Flanagan diatribes fairly regularly.   Perhaps they feel the need to balance out her desire to stay home and allow a man to take care of her with someone who feels that the patriarchal society may be coming to and end.

As a female in a male dominated industry who just today discussed survival of the fittest with her male colleagues one of whom was of the opinion that in other species, the male must be the colorful one to attract the females and wasn't he glad in the human species it's the women who must attract the males, I was intrigued by this article. 

It turns out society's been changing:  from industrial based to information based (newsflash!), and men are not adapting.   More women are going to college and graduate school (to the point where schools may be starting to skew admissions decisions in order to keep the male to female ratio at least 40/60).   And

The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.”

And then there was what may be my favorite paragraph I've read this year:

Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If the sexiest man alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else?

Shouldn't the hope be that he grows up or at least grows as a person and learns to live in his new world?  

The article's hypothesis seems to be that women are looking at the men and thinking:  if the men can't provide for them and their children, who needs them?  I'll call my own shots and be very happy doing it, thank you very much.   The article doesn't seem to draw any conclusions about what all this means or where we go from here, but I say Men:  the gauntlet has been thrown down.  Man up.  

The Things We Leave Behind

I leave things everywhere.. just ask anyone who knows me, especially my co-workers.   Find a water bottle?  Mine.   Notebook?    Mine.   Bag?  Mine.   You get the picture.   

Saturday morning I took my usual trip to the gym.   When I got there I noticed a pair of shoes sitting under a bench in the locker room.   Oh, I thought.. I have those same shoes, then I trotted off to step class.   Later that day I got to thinking about those shoes and that I hadn't seen my pair of those shoes in a while.  You can see where this is going.  I complete a search of my house and surprise, surprise, I can not find those shoes anywhere.   I decide not to go back to the gym, but just to see if they are still there on Sunday.

Sunday I rush in to Spin class and the shoes do not enter my mind once.   Later that night I think of them and realize I'm a jackass.  

Monday night I arrive for Step once again and the shoes remain under the little bench (does this locker room never get cleaned?).   I'm 100% positive these are my shoes, but I want to try them on to be sure.   However, there are other ladies hovering around.   I don't want it to look like I walked in, saw shoes under a bench and decided to just try them on to see if they fit, then take them.  So I wait around for a little while til no one is around.  Try them on and just like Cinderella, they are a perfect fit.   My shoes can now come home with me.  

Only then do I start thinking about when I could have left the shoes there.  I had been at the gym the previous Tues. and Weds.   But Weds. I wore a skirt which would have required shoes other than the shoes under the bench.   So Tues.  Almost an entire week those shoes sat under the bench and no one took them.   Astounding really.   

Ok, this story seemed a lot more interesting when I was thinking about writing this than how it seems now that it's in black and white.   

My Secret Dream Car...

I got to see it today... isn't it a beauty? 

The Weekend Blues

I'm not sure which brought my weekend down more: the water situation or the Red Sox.