When we purchased our Tucson house in 2001, our cell phone provider was Sprint, and that didn\u2019t work out very well. \u00a0For 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. \u00a0We had some visitors who had service from AT&T, and their service wasn\u2019t much better.<\/p>\n
One day I was in a store buying clothing when a call came in while I was in the dressing room. \u00a0I couldn\u2019t hear a word. \u00a0When I stormed out of the dressing room frustrated a few minutes later, the ladies in the store all said the same thing: \u00a0Switch to Verizon.<\/span><\/p>\n So we did, and it worked like a charm. \u00a0I sat in the living room here and read the better part of three Harry Potter books to my grandson in Washington state. \u00a0Because we had Verizon as did our daughter, Verizon to Verizon minutes were free.<\/span><\/p>\n So now there are plenty of ads on TV saying how great Verizon is, but it\u2019s not so great at our Tucson house\u2014not any more.<\/span><\/p>\n Tomorrow morning, starting at 5 AM\u2014Oh-dark-thirty in my book\u2014I\u2019ll be doing a radio tour. \u00a0That means I\u2019ll be doing drive time interviews with radio stations first on the East Coast and moving West at the same time drive time moves West. \u00a0At the moment I can\u2019t use the phone inside the house without Verizon dropping calls. \u00a0I can more or less sit outside on the patio, but even that isn\u2019t entirely reliable. \u00a0The next option is sitting in the middle of the patio\u2014in direct sunlight\u2014in probably ninety-plus degree weather\u2014not optimal for doing six hours of interviews. \u00a0The other problem with sitting on the patio is that Bella and Jojo go barking mad at the least disturbance\u2014like a passing lizard or a passing leaf or a leaf-blower wielding yard man. \u00a0Having dogs barking in the background of interviews is NOT a good thing.<\/span><\/p>\n 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. \u00a0When 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\u2019re a long way beyond the good old days of \u201cNumber, please,\u201d reliability back when Ma Bell was still Ma Bell.<\/span><\/p>\n 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. \u00a0(I believe that all of Bill\u2019s collection of oscilloscopes has been banished to the nether worlds where old electronics go to die.) <\/span><\/p>\n But the Princess phone? \u00a0If the cell phone number doesn\u2019t work, I\u2019ll give the producer the number on the Princess phone and hope to high heaven that one does. <\/span><\/p>\n With all of this in mind, I doubt I\u2019ll sleep very well tonight, and five AM is pretty early in the morning to be out of bed and worrying about communications reliability.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m an English major after all.<\/span><\/p>\n I just want things to work.<\/span><\/p>\n And now for a PS: \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2014one was leaking and the other one wouldn\u2019t stay lit. \u00a0So yesterday, while I was dealing with a morning full of telephone interviews, there were workers coming and going as the water heaters were replaced. \u00a0Cold showers and book tours are counter-indicated. \u00a0The one I took this morning was downright heavenly.<\/span><\/p>\n As for the phone thing? \u00a0The Princess phone didn\u2019t work. \u00a0As the producer told me, \u201cIt sounds too mechanical.\u201d \u00a0But my cell phone? \u00a0With one small glitch it worked fine. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because Bill CLEANED THE ANTENNA!!! \u00a0Aren\u2019t engineers great? \u00a0I guess my phone difficulties weren\u2019t Verizon\u2019s fault after all.<\/span><\/p>\n And then, at the end of the day\u2014which also happened to be National Women in Law Enforcement Day\u2014my editor called to say that Downfall will debut at #10 on the NYTimes<\/em> hardback list, #2 on the e-book list, and #5 on the combined hardback and e-book. \u00a0WAY TO GO. \u00a0Thank you one and all for making that happen!!!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we purchased our Tucson house in 2001, our cell phone provider was Sprint, and that didn\u2019t work out very well. \u00a0For 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. \u00a0We had some visitors who had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[33,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tour-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-kl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1262,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions\/1262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}