Yesterday afternoon, SteelyKid and I dozed off in the living room recliner. When I woke up, it had been three hours since she last ate, roughly her usual between-feedings interval, but she was still sound asleep on my lap. Kate was due home in half an hour or so, though, so I wasn't sure whether to wake and feed the baby, or let her sleep until Kate came home.
I decided to call Kate's cell to confirm her ETA. Not wanting to wake SteelyKid by getting up to get to the landline, I pulled out my trusty cell phone, running on what an endless string of Verizon ads assure me is America's finest cell phone network.
Not only do I not have any bars, I actually get the phone-with-a-line-through-it "no signal" symbol, as if I were out in the middle of the wilderness, or trapped in an iron mine, or something. While sitting in a comfortable chair in my own house, in a pleasant and affluent suburb.
If I ever run into the "Can you hear me now?" guy, I'm going to punch him right in the face.
(The sad thing is, Verizon really is about the best option around here. That doesn't make it easier to put up with those "You've got The Network" commercials six times an hour.)
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Couldn't you just ask that dude in the glasses standing in front of the army of technicians to get into the kitchen and whip up a bottle? He's got to be good for something.
I've never had a cell phone get good reception in my home. That's the main reason I still have a land line.
I put off getting a cell phone for many years because at one time my house was in a notorious dead spot--when the airport shuttle people picked me up they would have to get a couple of miles down the road before they could call in to say that I was on board.
What finally tipped me over into getting a cell phone a couple of years ago was the need to get in touch with this same airport shuttle service upon returning from a trip. Where pay phones had once been abundant, there were only two left in that particular terminal, and I realized that those two might not be there for long. By that time coverage had improved so that my house is no longer in a dead zone.
By chance are you right next to the river? Low spots are more likely to be dead spots. If you're on even moderately high ground you should be covered--in constructing the networks they generally gave priority to interstate highways, and you have two or three of those close by you.
You need UMA. It lets your cell phone make calls over your home WiFi network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Access_Network
In the US, only T-Mobile offers UMA.
http://www.theonlyphoneyouneed.com/