{"id":52,"date":"2007-10-08T08:17:48","date_gmt":"2007-10-08T15:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/wordpress\/archives\/61"},"modified":"2020-09-12T13:30:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-12T18:30:46","slug":"well-i-broke-my-cell-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/2007\/10\/well-i-broke-my-cell-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, I broke my cell phone. :("},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yep. A completely incongruous series of events which led to its poor little LCD screen being smashed upon my knee.<\/p>\n<p>First, I was wearing a pair of pants that I had that couldn&#8217;t use the side pockets on &#8212; the pockets were too small (what the hell were they good for then, eh?), and couldn&#8217;t be used for anything more than my pair of keys.<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully (or not), there was little &#8220;mid&#8221; pocket on them, about halfway down the leg that had a zipper and everything &#8212; perfect for those items that are too big to put in your side pockets, right? So, I stick my cell phone in there and forget about it. It&#8217;s sitting around banging against my knee when I walk, but at least it&#8217;s not falling out of my pocket and getting lost.<\/p>\n<p>Well, later on Nina and I go to my sister&#8217;s house for supper (she was cooking Italian sausage soup that night, so at least that part of the night was good), and she&#8217;s showing us the new bed that her and my brother-in-law had recently got, and she&#8217;s all like, &#8220;Jump up and see what it feels like,&#8221; and I jump up on it, knees first like an idiot, and then Crack! it&#8217;s broke.<\/p>\n<p>I knew just from the way the &#8220;crack&#8221; felt that it was broke. I pull it out of the pocket and the LDC screen looks like someone&#8217;s spilled chemicals inside it &#8212; those things look weird when they break, I&#8217;ll tell you what.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily enough for me, my phone still worked &#8212; I just couldn&#8217;t see anything on the screen. Text messaging is impossible, of course, but at least it still functions as a phone.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s that. What do I do? I bought it outright so that I didn&#8217;t have to get a 2-year contract with my cellphone company (almost unheard of where I live), and I don&#8217;t have the money to pay full price for a new one right now. So, I thought about repairing it myself.<\/p>\n<p>I actually wanted to give Alltel a chance to make some money (why the hell not &#8212; they&#8217;re one of the better cell phone companies in America), so I took it up to them to ask if they could fix it. I was willing to pay a little bit more for &#8220;quality&#8221; service from them, if they could fix it immediately.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I found out that not only do they not repair cell phones at the local Alltel shop where I live, but that they couldn&#8217;t even send off for the phone to be fixed &#8212; they said that it wouldn&#8217;t be &#8220;cost effective.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Read that as: &#8220;We&#8217;re selling these phones to you at a 1000% markup &#8212; you&#8217;re paying $300 for something that cost us like $30. Why the hell do we want to repair it? Just buy a new one.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sorry, Alltel &#8212; no can do.<\/p>\n<p>So, I go on Ebay and find a new LCD screen for $20. Hell, it&#8217;s worth it &#8212; even if it doesn&#8217;t work and I have to get a new cell phone in the end, I&#8217;m only out $20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yep. A completely incongruous series of events which led to its poor little LCD screen being smashed upon my knee. First, I was wearing a pair of pants that I had that couldn&#8217;t use the side pockets on &#8212; the pockets were too small (what the hell were they good for then, eh?), and couldn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-science-and-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ZUZG-Q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4733,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/4733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}