Category Archives: signal

Dial-Up Phone

Even though my phone is not that old, it is also not that good. Hubby doesn’t use anything except text messaging and the actual phone feature on his phone, so when he got these phones for us he didn’t take into consideration all the things I use my phone for. I email, blog, go online, and do all sorts of other things. The realization sunk in when he looked at our phone bill and noticed the extent of my internet usage. But by then it was too late. I was stuck with a phone that takes forever to load a page, runs out of memory every other day, and needs to be restarted several times a day.
Yesterday I was speaking with someone about the old days of the internet, reminiscing about dial-up. I remember trying to go online, and waiting forever for each page to load as my mother downstairs would yell to tell me to get off the internet so she could use the phone. And the page I was on still hadn’t come up.
That is what my phone is like. I sit there and stare at it as it loads anything. Then the screensaver comes on and disrupts all activity. Then the phone locks. So I attempt it again. But this time I am performing acrobatics under a table to acquire the best signal. Or holding my phone up towards the sky as if I am trying to catch something. Running out in the middle of the street with it. And all of this just to check email. And while it is loading the webpage, nothing else on the phone works, including the actual phone part.
In fact, should anyone text or call while I am performing any of this, the phone immediately stops everything. Then the little white bars pop up. There is no coming out of white bar territory. I have to restart my phone. Anything I was doing is immediately lost.
Now that I am thinking about it, I think this is worse than dial-up. At least I didn’t have to hold my computer out the bedroom window to run the internet. And if someone called I wasn’t thrown off the internet, they just got a busy signal. Now I get a missed call and they get a ridiculously long voicemail message that I should probably change to “You have reached Christene’s malfunctioning phone. Please hang up and text me. Thank you and have a nice day.”
Either I need a new phone, or I have to switch from 3G to dial-up on this one.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, don’t worry, it’s not important.