new phone 2018
March 15, 2018, 8:29 P.M.

Been alternately too busy/too tired to think about a post, but here goes...

With Spouse out of town for training last week, and the weather being horrible (SNOW. For THREE DAYS.) and all, I ended up saying fuck this and instead of trying to do snow removal single-handed with a bad back and fighting bad traffic in worse weather with a bad back and sitting in an office chair for 9 hours a day with a back back, I just stayed home for two days to nurse my screamingly painful wrenched back.

Did I mention I had a bad back?

Probably a good thing, anyway, I needed some mental and physical health days to ease the stress. Messed up my not calling in streak terribly, though. But I did have an absence ding fall off my record yesterday, which holds the whole thing at par, I guess.

Spouse got home about 8:30 on Wednesday night, and it sounds like, weather aside, he rather enjoyed the trip.

Thursday and Friday were business as usual; I got my (modest) annuial bonus. So I decided I would spend some of it on upgrading my phone, and stopped at the Verizon store after work on Friday.

I could only lookee--no--buyee, since I am not the account holder, but it gave me a chance to see what was being offered, and check out how they looked, felt in my hand, etc. Had to come back after Spouse got off work to actually purchase it. I decided on the LG Stylo 2; because it fit my needs, and didn't cost an arm, a leg, and a friggin' eye. Not a lot to choose from in my price range, anyway. And speaking of that, what the hell happended to phone prices?! When I bought my last phone in August of 2014, it cost me a hundred bucks, and I had a $25 credit for my Samsung. And that got me a cutting-edge LG G3.

So WTF? I just had to spend $240 for a two-year old technology, mid-pack LG Stylo 2, plus for the first time in my cellphone-buying history, they didn't waive the activation fee, and I ended up paying another $25.00 for a screen protector, which turned out to be plastic, not glass, and defective to boot. (More on that later.) And I wasn't even looking for something under $250, but there is pretty much a pricing dead zone between what I paid and the over $500 phones. I don't get it.

So by the time we got out of there, we were hungry and tired and stopped for some takeout at the local taco stand before getting home. Spouse went to bed right after supper, since Friday is his Monday and he was pretty beat.

I stayed up till midnight, trying to make my new phone as exactly like my old one as I possibly could. Succeeded to a greater extent than I had hoped for; some issues took a little longer, including one I had with my email that took several calls to customer service to correct on Monday.

And the screen cover is still not resolved; I took my phone in on Tuesday and they replaced it. Three times. And it did the same non-stick trick in the same spots with all three, so obviously a factory defect with the whole batch, and I have to wait for a new batch to come in.

They also tried to sell me a phone cover on Friday--they had two that fit my phone, and I liked one of them, but there was no way I was going to pay $24.99 for it.

So I found the exact same one on line for $5.94, with free shipping, and ordered it late Friday night. It was in my mailbox Monday.