MyGlobalCity

Dealing With Your Cellular Provider’s Downtimes March 21, 2006

I just got off a tech assistance call to my cellular provider, which I initiated when I couldn’t access my email or the web from my new, beloved PalmOne Treo 650. After over a half hour of very pleasant assistance, we got nowhwere. Except that the tech rep admitted to the network being down out in the western provinces in Canada. I said that this must be the problem for me, somehow, as well. She was unwilling to agree and instead pleasantly sent me through configuring, trying, and reconfiguring my Treo’s network settings for a half hour or so.

Now despite actually getting nowhere with the problem, and having to wait for a callback within 24 hours, I’m actually lucky to have kept the help session to about a half hour. Had I not had another phone line available to me, it might have taken me a lot longer to figure out what I already knew but my friendly rep wouldn’t agree to. Apparently, the Palm Treo is designed in such a way that you cannot simultaneously use the phone and any of the applications. (With the exception of a free call recording program I found via Treonauts.)

So at the start of the support call, I was asked to if there was another phone number that they could call me back at so that I could run the tests on the Treo. I strongly resisted the urge to tell them to call me on my free Skype Internet phone account, opting instead for using a relative’s home phone line. As I said, I was lucky, considering that I have not had my own land line for nearly a decade now, preferring instead the mobile warrior’s life with one or more cell phones and pagers. And that despite my deep, mixed-up Luddite viewpoints