Two annoying technology moments yesterday:
1) Kate and I got cell phones when we bought this house, and have been overpaying for them for quite some time. We rarely use them (partly because we get no signal inside the house), and have never come close to using our monthly allocation of minutes.
Verizon now offers pre-paid plans, which would save us a good deal of money that could then be spent on baby toys, so we went to the local Verizon store to switch over. And immediately got told that they couldn't guarantee that we could keep the same numbers. And then that it would take an hour or so to do the switch. Then that they needed my driver's license. Then that they needed to split the phone into two separate accounts, complicating the billing.
Of course, if we wanted to go with a more expensive plan, they could do everything immediately, with no hassle...
2) Our printer has been warning that the black cartridge was low for some time now, even though there has been no detectable decrease in print quality. Yesterday, when I tried to print something so I could review it for work, it decided that the black cartridge was done, and now refuses to print anything. I spent ten minutes trying to find a way to make it keep printing, with no luck, and along the way had to fend off about fifty dialogue boxes trying to get me to buy toner online.
Laser printers have gotten to be too goddamn smart. There's toner still in that cartridge, but since that's where they make their money these days, the printer is determined not to let me use it.
Verizon and Hewlett Packard: You're on notice.
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Does anyone besides Verizon offer pre-paid plans in your area? Last year I switched from a monthly plan with Cingular to a prepaid plan with T-Mobile, and T-Mobile was *happy* to let me switch and keep my old number.
If that's not possible, consider changing your number anyway. Your friends and family can suck it up.
Evan Goer: Huh. When I switched from Sprint to a prepaid T-Mobile plan, I wasn't able to keep my old number. (Not a big deal; there were only about six people who had that number.) The advantage of T-Mobile's prepaid plan is that the minutes are good for 90 days, not 30 like the other companies.
Dude, when it's time to get a new color printer, I recommend dye-sublimation rather than toner-based laser. We have a Xerox Phaser model 8 thousand mumble mumble in the lab, and it prints great, fast, is totally reliable, and uses these solid blocks of dye. There is much less packaging and plastic and shit than toner cartridges, and it uses the block of dye completely up. It has slots where you can slide in multiple dye blocks, so you never have to run out unexpectedly or in the middle of a print job.
There's no other way to put it: the mobile industry is a thorough scam. How else do you explain an industry with the temerity to charge ten cents to a quarter for a text message, which is a tiny fraction of the data sent in even a second of voice communication?
Personally I held out until I got in a serious car crash and would have had no way to call someone except for the phone I borrowed that day... but I'd still prefer not to deal with them because of their business model.
Mary Aileen: Yup, I was able to transfer the old number. Though it didn't matter too much, for the same reason. :)
Verizon REALLY did not want me to make that switch, and even while doing it and looking at my records, tried to tell me I wouldn't be saving any money, and that I should use the BETTER prepaid plan than the one I asked for. I made the switch and now even at $1 per day-of-use, .10 a minute and .10 a text, I STILL only pay $15 a month. (And generally ACCUMULATE un-used minutes!!)
Yes, I use my cell like a 70 year old woman.
I have the T-Mobile prepaid, and what I like about it is that if you are willing to buy $100 worth of minutes when you set it up, they are good for a year (and no day-of-use fee). I use mine so seldom that I didn't even use what I had the first year, but was able to roll them over for another year by buying $25 worth of minutes on the day before they expired. $125 for two years is hard to beat.
If you sign up through their web site, they say that you can transfer your old number, although I didn't try to do so.
For the laserjet, I suggest taking a good look at http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/ for some suggestions on how to bypass the company's lockdown. On some models it requires nothing more than a bit of black electrical tape over the sensor, which tricks it into thinking it's fuller, and thus letting you get the last 15-30% out of it.
Head down to the local department store and look closely at the pre-paid phones. This one is an Altell model. I got one for about $20. Then turned around and bought $100 of time, 666 hours that last for a year. Last year I didn't use all the time.
I figure that less than $130, $10.83 a month is about as good as it gets.
Check out the refill kits for the printer. In most cases it is as simple as lifting a label, squirting in a syringe full of ink or toner, and taping over the hole.
How else do you explain an industry with the temerity to charge ten cents to a quarter for a text message, which is a tiny fraction of the data sent in even a second of voice communication?
And not only that, but they charge both the sender and the receiver. Whether or not the receiver actually wanted to receive the message. In the past 12 months I have neither sent a text message nor received one that I wanted to receive, but I have paid 80 cents for the four spam text messages sent to my phone.
I was also a late, reluctant convert to cell phones. I only got mine because I noticed pay phones were disappearing, and there are times when I have no other means of communication.
For the younger generation, cell phones have completely taken over--many don't even have land lines. This weekend I was at a college reunion and stayed in one of the dorms. In my day every room had a telephone that provided on-campus service (off-campus, even local, was extra). The room where I stayed still had a wall jack, but the phone was gone.
We stick with Verizon because we do a lot of driving through the length of Massachusetts and in our experience, they have the best coverage in western Mass.
They also have a "$100 worth of minutes lasts a year" option for prepaid minutes, which we got.
Ooooh, I get to out-geek Comrade PhysioProf -- that's a thermal wax printer ya got there, not a dye-sub. I've lusted after one of those for many a year -- for personal use (what can I say -- I'd love to print D&D maps in glorious color).
Dye-sub printers are incredibly nice, but far from cheap materials wise. The ones I've used have rolls of film impregnated with the dye.
Thermal-wax sounds like nifty tech (and a bit perverted).