Tribune Poll >> Cell Phone Ban OK.

There is finally a bill up at the State Legislature that would deal with the problem of phoning/texting while driving, and according to the Salt Lake Tribune this morning, I'm not the only one that thinks it's about time. When asked "Would you support or oppose legislation restricting cell phone use while driving?", 80% of Utahns support the restricting of cell phone use in cars (with a 4.5% margin of error; Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc, Washington D.C.) You should all know my personal opinion by now - I hope the bill passes, even though the article admitted that it has a small chance. Once again showing that the Utah State Legislature truly represents it's constituents.

Ain't it the truth.....

One, one, ... one phone in two!

Did you know that Qwest is going out of the wireless phone business? I did, because my only phone is with them. The good news is that they made a deal with Verizon for their customers to swap over without the usual disconnect/reconnect charges. I went down to Best Buy, an authorized Verizon/Qwest switcheroo place. The people were really, really nice, they didn't even give me the evil eye when I told them that I wanted a phone that rings, period. That's actually what I said when they asked what features I was looking for in a phone; "It needs to ring." They even understood that the comment meant that I didn't want cameras, texting, web access, spy satellite uplinks or access to the ICBM's. (Well, that last one would be cool). They didn't even flinch when I told them I wanted the Verizon insurance rather than the Best Buy insurance because I was more likely to lose the thing than destroy it. Anyway, $77.93 later I'm walking out of there with a brand new phone, power cord for the car and clip on holder. And it's already hooked up. Uh, well, sort of. Seems there's a little glitch with porting over land-line phone numbers, even if they've been attached to a cell phone for several years. Seems that it may take up to 7 days before it's fully ported over. But not to worry, I can use my new phone already. As a matter of fact, I need to, because the old phone won't make outgoing calls anymore. But it will take incoming calls until the number is ported over, which is good since the new phone won't be taking any incoming phones yet. So, if in the next week, I call you up and tell you that I never got your call, I'm actually not just trying to avoid you - it just means I left the receiving phone at home and only brought the calling phone.

Parent-Teacher conferences are over!

And I had only one parent that was mad at me, because I accused his daughter of texting while in class. I apologized for making that assumption, but pointed out that she has to expect that reaction when she sits in a hot room, wearing a hoodie and twiddling her thumbs inside the pocket of the hoodie. That was about it, except I found out that the room the Foreign Language teacher moved into is in a cell phone dead zone, about 90% of phones do not work in there. It has no windows, but I still want to arm wrestle her for it - cell phones are currently one of the biggest teaching pains in the @$$. I even looked online for a cell phone blocker one time, and was all ready to fork out the $200 for one, until I checked it out on the internet and found out that I just might find Homeland Security at my classroom door one day, and from then on when asked, the administration would be required to answer "Mr. Who? No we never had a teacher here by that name."

Strolling through the park one day......

If you don't know that I'm not a big fan of driving while on the phone, then you're either new or haven't been paying attention. I'm not sure why we, as a society, tolerate it any more than we tolerate drunk driving - studies have shown it's every bit as dangerous. Anyway, I'm taking my walk around Sugarhouse park today, walking opposite the direction of traffic because I like to look people in the face as I pass them. 3/4 of the way around the park I see this car coming towards me, and the driver is not only talking on the phone, but also reading at the same time. While driving through a park. Where a bunch of kids are running around, not to mention bikers, joggers, walkers and skaters. When are we going to put some teeth into our laws so that these people can be pulled over and told that this is just not OK? We have a distracted driving law on the books with two fatal flaws. It does not state any specific behavior as an example of distractred drivingand it's only enforcable as a secondary infraction. You cannot be pulled over for distracted driving, but if you cause an accident or are pulled over for speeding you can be cited for it. I thought laws were supposed to be preventative, not punitive. Secondary infraction laws are punitive, not preventative, because nobody thinks that they're going to cause an accident. It's like having drunk driving laws that are secondary to vehicular homicide. Don't kill anyone and you're OK, but if you run someone over we're really going to slap it to you for being drunk.

Qwest and the one day rule.

Fun hour here folks. I tried to call the company making the welcome mats for the high school and found out my cell phone (and only phone) had been shut off. I was automatically forwarded to their collection department. Now, a few months ago I had renewed with a 2 year contract and was given $150 credit. This month was the first time in a few months that I actually owed something, on the 12th I was notified that I owed $20. I get paid once a month, so I was just going to pay it at the end of the month, like I always have. Not so much this time. Seems that over the months that I've had the credit Qwest found out that since cell phones are luxuries, they are allowed to shut off your service for being one (1) {uno} [a single] day late. And even if it's for a mere $20. I explained all this to the service rep, trying to remain calm since it really wasn't his fault. He was sympathetic, to the point of transferring me to the accounts department so I could have my due date changed to after the 1st. After being on hold for about 5 or 6 minutes I lost the connection and was basically hung up on. So I called back. Got another guy and told him my whole story again, adding in the fact that I've had the same phone number for 15 years and been paying on it faithfully for that long and that I thought it was absurd they would shut off my phone for being one day late. He was sympathetic too, got my phone back on without having to pay the $20 right now (I told him I wouldn't have the money until I got paid at the end of the month). The only problem is that now I have to go down to the Qwest store tomorrow and get them to change my due date to the 3rd, because if I don't I will have to either go through this every month or start paying my bill 26 days in advance. I tell ya, I love big corporations.

If I were a paranoid-schizophrenic I'd think they were all after me....

At the risk of beating this issue to death, I had yet another incident while driving today. I'm trying to leave out the mundane, run of the mill stupid, arrogant maneuvers. But this one was a fresh new look on brain dead. Coming out of the Smith's on 9th & 9th, there is clearly an in and an out, and both of them are wide enough for 2 cars, one turning left, the other turning right. As I'm leaving, wanting to turn right, there are two cars as far left as possible, exactly where they should be to turn left. Virginia Subaru up front isn't signaling, the Camry (or whatever) behind is signaling right, but in Utah that doesn't mean anything, so I pull to the right of them positioning myself to turn right. I was driving the LTD Convertible, and didn't even have to hop the curb to get around them, that's how far to the left they were. Camry honks as I go by, like I was supposed to sit back there until I was 100% sure which of the conflicting cues was correct. I ignore it. Just as I'm about to pull out into traffic, dumbass Virginia Subaru blares his horn at me and cuts me off, taking a right turn from the left lane, right in front of me, all the while talking on his cell phone. So I honk back and, as I pass him as he pulls into a parking space, yell something about hanging up the phone and driving. He honks again and flips me the bird. I verbalize the finger back at him and head off home. 2 fer 1 deal on boneheads @ Smith's today.

Just some stuff I found....

this was in the Tribune today. It wouldn't be funny if it weren't so true......
And this one I found while cleaning out my garage, something a student from a couple years ago drew.

Quality time with Mom

Yes, this is going to be another "slam cell phone addicts" kind of post, so skip it if you want.
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I'm driving down the hill above the capitol, wanted to get pictures of the Key Bank from up there before they imploded it. I'm going maybe 30 MPH when this woman in a Volvo SUV decides she wants to go 40. Rides my rear bumper until I almost come to a stop, and then she tries to pass me. On a residential street. Well, her asinine driving aside, the whole time she was behind me she was, of course, yakking away on her cell phone. As much as I hate cell phones and driving, that's not even the point of this post - the point is that what looked like her daughter was sitting in the passenger seat right next to her, that we are getting altogether too comfortable talking to someone across the valley through a little box rather than the warm, living, breathing person right next to us. Ever seen 3 people at a restaurant, all of them on cell phones? 2 people in a car or a group in the park? I have. This woman may very well have had something important to tell someone, something that couldn't have waited. How sad, though, if she let her daughter sit there in silence as she chatted with her friend about last weekend? Or even been talking to her office about something that could have waited 15 minutes?

I firmly believe that no matter how "connected" we claim to be with e-mail, cell phones and even blogs like this, that NOTHING compares to sitting down next to someone and chatting face to face. And we, as a society, are willfully giving that up.

Pathetic.

Every good Epic is a Trilogy

[Previously on "A Tale of Two Phones" our Hero had his two phones stolen out of his classroom, heard kids on the other end when he called them, had them disconnected, reported them stolen, got an ornery e-mail from a friend he missed a meeting with, had his older brother contact him because his father contacted the older brother when the people who found one of the cell phones contacted the father, and told our Hero to contact his father about the phone.]

So I went to the address that Julia gave me and and it was every bit as charming as she described it. I started talking to the lady at the front door, who at first looked at me like I was growing a second head out my left shoulder and then told me she had no idea what I was talking about. After being told she was clueless a couple of times, it finally dawned on her that I probably wanted to talk to people in the basement apartment. As I'm walking around the side of the house, this guy comes up out of a stairwell to meet me, not having central air their windows were all open and he had heard the conversation. At first he seemed to be somewhat cautious, like he was expecting me to demand his son be arrested for theft, or maybe I'd settle for a portion of the family fortune. Once I had made it clear that I simply wanted the other phone back, and had no intention of retribution, he became friendly and invited me into the house to talk to culprit #1, his (probably 8 year old) son Zachary. A charming apartment, with 2 kids at the table munching cereal, mom laying on the couch and the baby in a pen with her diaper sliding down about the knees. Zach had no idea where the phones came from, (yeah, right), but remembered the other phone because his friend was taking pictures with it. The parents, or whatever relationship the man had with the family (at one point he said to Zack - just wait 'till your dad gets home), were very helpful. They got Zack to tell which friend it was that had the camera, called the house and got no answer, started giving me directions to the house and even gave me the mom & kids name. Culprit #2 - another 8 year old named Harley (and I quote Zack's mom "like the motorcycle"). The mom even decided to accompany me over to the other house, which I thought was weird because most women I know would never get in a car with a male who was a complete stranger. By the conversation on the way over, it was obvious that mom figured that her son and Harley had taken them off my desk together, and I got the satisfaction of knowing that little Zack would be grounded for at least long enough to know that it wasn't a good thing he did.

We get to Harley's house and dad, or some sort of male father figure, was sitting out front and came to us as we drove up. Instead of breaching the subject slowly, Mom greets him with "Harley's been stealing cell phones off of teacher's desks at Granite" and 'dad' comes out with "F#$%$%, little b#%$^$, f*(&^^" and invites us to follow him inside. He starts grilling little Harley, who is playing completely innocent. No he never had any cell phones. No he didn't take them. No he wasn't taking pictures with one of them. His mom (who looked to be about 18) jumps to his defense - she never saw him with a cell phone, he never had them. So 'dad' asks Harley if he had been to Granite High recently and Harley adamantly says "No, I haven't been there in a long time." This is where little bro (probably 6) speaks up. "You were there just the other day, you told me" Harley still denies it. This is where I did my best teacher impression and looked straight at Harley and said "Harley, I don't want to get anyone in trouble, I just need to get that phone back, that's all I want." Harley opens his mouth and even before he can spew out another lie, little bro reaches out his hand and says "You mean this one?" It's brown trouser time for Harley as dad's vein starts to throb, mom becomes incredibly silent and invisible, and I take the phone, thank him for giving it to me and prepare to leave. I opened the phone to see if it was mine, and find the contact list contains nobody I know. Instead I now have the number for Deni, Dj Dopey, Dutch and someone they refer to as Mushroom. My heart stops because I think I have the wrong phone, so I quickly check the phone settings and find the number for the phone. There it is, my number and my name. Phew! (The phone also had the pictures the kids took, one of which looks incredibly X-Filesish, so you may be able to see Harley, Zack and/or little brother when I figure outhow to get them out of there.)

Anyway, that's the saga. All is well again, the internet even seems to be working fine, although I'm not cancelling my repair appointment tomorrow, 'cause if I do I know the internet will go down again...... see ya around

The Saga Continues

Part One

First of all, this morning I get up, and the internet is doing the exact same thing it was doing before. Two green lights and that's all. Bleah. I'm so sick of this I almost started crying. So I call Comcast and they're sending someone out again tomorrow to look at it. Even though it's up again, I'm not cancelling, because who knows how long it's going to last. So if you have a hard time getting on my site, that's why.

Part Two

I got a call from Alex yesterday, who got a call from dad who had gotten a call from the someone who had my phone. Oh, did I mention that Alex had had to call Danny to get my phone number? Lotta calling going on. Anyway, this guy had found my cell phone in the cusions of his couch, looked through the contact list and saw one for "DAD". Figuring that this was someone related to me, he called the number to let them know they had my phone. Of course dad couldn't call me, so he and Julia went down there to get the phone for me. Julia said something about them making "Deliverance" look like "90210", and that they got the impression that the parents knew it was their kids that took the phone. Fortunatly, Julia still had the address, because they only got my home phone back, now I have to go by and see if they can find my school phone. That's gonna be fun.

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I'm taking 2 weeks off from the Chevron before school starts. I think I'll just go up to the land and hide for that time........

That 70's Day

Let's see, it's been and interesting and fun couple of days for me, relearned to live in the days before internet and cell phones. For a day at least.

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The last couple of days my internet has been sporadically going on and off. I got the new modem and it worked for a day or so and then went kaput again. So I called Comcast, again, and scheduled an appointment for today for them to come out and look at it, sometime between 8am and noon. At 10 the internet comes back on, and I'm thinking "Great! Now the cable guy is going to get here and it's going to be working fine." He gets here about 45 minutes later and the cable is still working, so he starts checking it. He checks it out back, let's out a whistle and tells me that the decibels (or something like that) are supposed to run between -5 and +5, and will tend to cut out completely at -15. I was running at -14.4. He also told me that the ratio of errors-to-bits should be 1 in a billion, I was running at 1 in a thousand. He opened up the little box on the back of the house, removed some capacitor looking thing, hooked up his gizmo again, and let out another whistle. Bad capacitor thing, bad, bad capacitor thing. The cable is running at about +9 without it. Now that that is all replaced I'm still running above the +5 mark at the modem, which is very good. Now I've got one foot back in the new millineum.
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Yesterday I was at school starting to set up my classroom. Got there just in time to go out to lunch with the whole gang and then came back to work on my new room. It's summer, nobody is supposed to be in the building, so when I ran upstairs to get some stuff from my techie room, I left the door open. With my personal and my school cell phone sitting on my desk. I was supposed to meet Adele at 3:45 to go see the Simpson's Movie (two thumbs up) and at 3:30 I start packing up to leave. Um, where's the cell phones? Nowhere. In a panic I heaqd down to the office, borrow Tessa's cell phone and start calling mine. Some kid, my guess was 9 or so, answers, mumbles some stuff and hangs up. Great. Call the other phone. Same thing. Double Great. By now it's almost 4:00 and I don't even know Adele's number to call her and tell her what's going on. First things first, I call Qwest to cancel my phone, they were incredibly helpful, they even called South Salt Lake Police to make the report, and let me know how to claim my phone with their insurance and get a new one. Then I have to call Verizon to let get my school number shut down. Now it's almost 4:30 and I just know Adele is all pissed off at me for standing her up. So I look up her parent's number in the phone book, call her mom, get her cell number and then call her. She's not mad at all, she figured something like this had happpend when she called my number and got a 9 year old, who just mumbled something and hung up. First time she called she thought I might have been at Danny's house and either Josh or Dylan had been messing with the phone, but after the third time she figured I would have gotten it from them by then. Well, the phone company is sending me a new phone, it'll get here within 3 days. Until then I'm using one of the counselors cell phones.

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So, I got a reminder of what it was like before the days of cell phones and the internet. Nobody (except Danny, because his cell was the one number I could remember) could call me, I didn't have to come home and check my e-mails, and blogging was completely out of the question. Hmmmm, actually it wasn't that bad of a day........

It finally happened.

D & R (aka General Chaos and White Lioness) borrowed my Subaru for a couple days a while back and they both asked me if I ever had reactions to my bumper stickers. Seems that both of them had some smartass mimic cell phone useage in an ovious attempt to mock the bumper stickers. I don't know if I had just been oblivious to the mockings or if it just never happened, but I honestly told them "no". Until today. I'm driving down 13th east headed to the Home Depot, and right after crossing I-80, I hear someone honking. Looking over to the right I see these two highschool guys in their parents new Yukon, swerving in and out of traffic, honking at me, talking on their cell phones and flipping me off. And who said teenagers were idiots? Anyways, I just laughed, flipped them off, downshifted, slid to the right and passed a blockade right before the right lane ended and left them in the dust. Well, until the light at Highland Drive. They passed me turning left onto Highland, leaning out the window screaming something at me. I had the air on and all the windows up so I didn't hear, and just kept looking forward with my finger at the window at them. But I did post their plate number on this great site Danny got me hooked on called PlateWire. If you're looking for a way to vent frustration with bad drivers without resorting to road rage, you ought to check it out. Gives me a better outlet - I have it bookmarked over on the left for future reference, if you need it.

As if 13 year olds acting like 13 year olds ain't annoying enough.....

She walked into the Chevron like she was walking onto a yacht..... (if you recognize those lyrics, you're old. like me.)

Bleached blonde hair. Tight care-bear shirt and a short Levi cutoff skirt. Just enough extra weight on her 20-something frame to make this outfit you usually see on a 7th grade girl look kind of like a poorly stuffed sausage. She walks in talking on her cell phone, loudly, with a sing-song voice that brought me right back to my Jr. High teaching days (well, it was only a year ago). Even at the counter we can hear her talking at the back of the store. Things like whatever!, omg, bff, inbd and other girly texting phrases. She goes through the entire checking-out process talking on her phone like this and as she walks out the door the guy I'm helping turns to me, holding back a laugh, and asks "What the hell was that?" An overweight 13-year-old that's old enough to buy beer. Thats what.

So, please keep in mind that when you are talking on your cell phone in public - it's not all that private, and many of us really don't want to hear it. And what we do want to hear, we just want to make fun of......

Jackasses, cellphones and squeeged shorts......

Monday, monday....., First I want to thank my anonymouse friend from France for another story about Max, who if we haven't all figured out by now is my paternal grandfather. If you want to read it, it's added to the "Ducks in the road" post, just click on there.

Now to the main event. It's about 10 minutes to 7 this morning, and I'm just getting off the freeway at 7th East. (Click on the picture for a better look). The light turns green and just as I get my entire car out into the intersection, I notice this big 'ol white Chevy truck heading right at me, and he ain't slowing down. I slam on my brakes (TGFABS), the guy next to me does just the same, just as the morontosaurus notices that he's burning a red light. I'm stopped, SUV next to me is stopped, Chevy still heading straight at my door. As Holly said about exceeding light speed; "It's brown trouser time". Now this is the picture that I see in my head, it is entirely possible that my brain filled in some of the details and it's not entirely accurate, but it's my image and I'm keeping it. I see the driver dropping his cell phone from his head as he yanks the steering wheel to the left, squealing wheels around the front of my car, within inches of my bumper. I can see his face, I can see his hand halfway to the steering wheel and the phone in mid air. It's a Nokia, one of those slim ones. Black, not the pink. Yeah, a little detailed for something that happened in a split second, at a time where I was only half awake. Anyway, he makes it around my car, just to see another vehicle in his way, yanks the wheel to the left again, realizes there's no lane there for him and continues leftward onto the freeway entrance. I stuff my heart back down into my chest and proceed to school. What a way to start a Monday morning........

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Hope yours was better.