When we purchased our Tucson house in 2001, our cell phone provider was Sprint, and that didn’t work out very well.  For one thing, the only place the phone actually worked was if I was standing in the far back corner of the yard and hanging over the fence.  We had some visitors who had service from AT&T, and their service wasn’t much better.

One day I was in a store buying clothing when a call came in while I was in the dressing room.  I couldn’t hear a word.  When I stormed out of the dressing room frustrated a few minutes later, the ladies in the store all said the same thing:  Switch to Verizon.

So we did, and it worked like a charm.  I sat in the living room here and read the better part of three Harry Potter books to my grandson in Washington state.  Because we had Verizon as did our daughter, Verizon to Verizon minutes were free.

So now there are plenty of ads on TV saying how great Verizon is, but it’s not so great at our Tucson house—not any more.

Tomorrow morning, starting at 5 AM—Oh-dark-thirty in my book—I’ll be doing a radio tour.  That means I’ll be doing drive time interviews with radio stations first on the East Coast and moving West at the same time drive time moves West.  At the moment I can’t use the phone inside the house without Verizon dropping calls.  I can more or less sit outside on the patio, but even that isn’t entirely reliable.  The next option is sitting in the middle of the patio—in direct sunlight—in probably ninety-plus degree weather—not optimal for doing six hours of interviews.  The other problem with sitting on the patio is that Bella and Jojo go barking mad at the least disturbance—like a passing lizard or a passing leaf or a leaf-blower wielding yard man.  Having dogs barking in the background of interviews is NOT a good thing.

We have a land-line wired into the house. The problem is, the handset connected to that is almost as unreliable as the cell phone service.  When it comes to having the sound cut in and out, both the cell phone and the landline handset are equally bad. At this point it feels like we’re a long way beyond the good old days of “Number, please,” reliability back when Ma Bell was still Ma Bell.

So yesterday, when I was worrying about possible connection problems, Bill went out to the garage and dredged an old Princess handset out of one or the other of his boxes of aging electronics equipment.  (I believe that all of Bill’s collection of oscilloscopes has been banished to the nether worlds where old electronics go to die.)

But the Princess phone?  If the cell phone number doesn’t work, I’ll give the producer the number on the Princess phone and hope to high heaven that one does.

With all of this in mind, I doubt I’ll sleep very well tonight, and five AM is pretty early in the morning to be out of bed and worrying about communications reliability.

I’m an English major after all.

I just want things to work.

And now for a PS:  

While I was writing the blog on Tuesday, Bill was coming to grips with the fact that both of our 15 year old water heaters had bitten the dust—one was leaking and the other one wouldn’t stay lit.  So yesterday, while I was dealing with a morning full of telephone interviews, there were workers coming and going as the water heaters were replaced.  Cold showers and book tours are counter-indicated.  The one I took this morning was downright heavenly.

As for the phone thing?  The Princess phone didn’t work.  As the producer told me, “It sounds too mechanical.”  But my cell phone?  With one small glitch it worked fine.  Why?  Because Bill CLEANED THE ANTENNA!!!  Aren’t engineers great?  I guess my phone difficulties weren’t Verizon’s fault after all.

And then, at the end of the day—which also happened to be National Women in Law Enforcement Day—my editor called to say that Downfall will debut at #10 on the NYTimes hardback list, #2 on the e-book list, and #5 on the combined hardback and e-book.  WAY TO GO.  Thank you one and all for making that happen!!!