Beans, Brooklyn & Controversy

Another of those away from the beach days…

For a short time there I thought my telephone troubles with Sprint were a thing of the past. Key to the problem is service. A shortage, and too often lack of customer service here in the US continues to color my post-Japan days. Seems like for every good and helpful customer service rep you encounter, there are nine other not so good reps to wade through before reaching the good one. My phone trouble is definitely not a thing of the past, but Monday did at least bring two different first class service reps from Sprint. The frustrating side of the ongoing phone problem comes with the knowledge that any and all problems would have been solved in the first thirty minutes if this were happening in Japan. A fairly simple cell phone problem with Sprint is now into its fifth month. Tell me something is not wrong with that scenario. This time I have been promised delivery of a brand new telephone between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. Could happen, I suppose.

Over in that neighborhood, so taking a small detour to Barnes & Noble was the sweet I needed to wash away the taste of a phone forever bad. Had been awhile, so the chances of finding something good were high. Not hard to convince me into sidetracking to a bookstore; the hard part comes in trying to get out of the store empty-handed. Once inside, on occasions when books on the ‘new’ shelf have nothing to entice, the feeling is something like disappointed relief. The relief is over not spending money before getting ten feet inside the doors. My hurdle this time was back in the L section with the discovery of an unfamiliar book by David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk. Leavitt is a writer I usually keep up with, chiefly because of his very impressive and controversial book ‘about’ English writer Stephen Spender, While England Sleeps (1993). The first printing of the book was eventually pulped following a court decision in favor of the Spender family. Leavitt then rewrote the disputed sections for a later edition.

Next to hit my radar was Jonathan Lethem’s novel, The Fortress of Solitude. If it’s anything close to the earlier book, Motherless Brooklyn I will be a happy reader. To those unfamiliar with Jonathan Lethem you can sample his wares through a New Yorker short story here. I’ve always thought it was a toss up between Lethem and Paul Auster as to who gives us the richer Brooklyn savor.

Being so near, my taste buds and imagination were getting roused by vibrations from Chipotle a few hundred feet down the road. The first time for lunch at the restaurant, an oversized burrito bursting with rice, beans, cheese, avocado and sour cream enough for an NFL front four put me off and I stayed away for a while. On my second visit I hit the jackpot with a rice, bean and chicken green salad. The only drawback with Chipotle is the noise and lack of inside space, which means sitting outside—a hot spot in August. Inside or out, the lunch is tasty, filling and reasonably priced.

Good feeling to walk through the rain to my car.

Hell on Earth

Trouble with my cell phone a few days ago had me scrambling for most of the day trying to find a solution to what anyone would have called a simple problem—everyone that is except Sprint and the folks at Best Buy where I bought the phone. In a post last Wednesday I wrote a little about this problem and the frustrations that followed, wondering then if I shouldn’t just throw the phone away. But really, how many people do you know who throw their phone away? Hyperbole sometimes looks good on paper, but…

The experience last Tuesday started with two interminable hours on the phone (not mine) with Sprint tech support explaining the problem to two different reps who…well, let’s just say English was a problem. In the end I gave up and said I would take the problem to where I bought the phone less than one year ago. Twenty-two miles and forty minutes later I sat down with a young lady at the cell phone counter in Best Buy. She listened to my explanation, took the cell phone but immediately answered a call on her cell phone. She continued to fiddle with my phone with one hand and upon finishing her call handed my phone back saying it was okay, that she had reinstalled the ABC and deleted the XYZ. The phone was showing full bars and she even told me to call her number to be sure. It worked.

For fifteen minutes. Whatever the Best Buy rep did to the phone, it didn’t last. So, I drove the long road home and went to the Sprint office in my little beachtown. The man I spoke to there fiddled with the phone, clicked a few keys on the computer and said it was fixed. “Look. it’s only showing one bar in the window,” I pointed out. “Oh, don’t worry. That’s okay,” he answered. “But if you’re worried about it you can take it to the Sprint store in Port Orange. The guy there is real sharp.” Port Orange is only eighteen miles away.

The second fix was just as short-lived as the first, so the following morning I made the long drive over to the Port Orange Sprint store to have the ‘real sharp guy’ check out my phone. He and another store rep huddled over my phone and did ‘phone speak’ for about twenty minutes, jiggled some buttons and pronounced it cured. Could you blame me for being just a wee tiny bit skeptical about that pronouncement? Back in the car and a half mile down the road the phone died on the seat next to me. That was enough for one day. I pushed the problem out of my head.

Saturday and Sunday passed, my telephone working in a sort of hit ’n miss fashion, though incoming calls were blocked. On Monday noon I retuned to Best Buy in Daytona, determined to speak to the store manager and demand a new telephone. At first, the same young lady, the one from last Tuesday with the full body tattoos asked if she could help me, and I asked for the supervisor. He came over and listened to the whole story then went to work pressing buttons and adjusting the ABC. Another rep drifted over and suggested resetting the phone. “Oh, yes! Let’s try that.” And there went my contacts in a poof of smoke. I suggested a new phone, an upgrade of the broken one and I would happily pay the $9.99 listed, but was told it would cost $279.99 unless I waited until May of 2013 and then it would be $9.99. Then I got the suggestion to take the broken phone to ANOTHER Sprint store in Ormond Beach ten miles away. Naturally I got lost trying to find it.

Inside the Ormond Beach Sprint store a man was filling out the forms for a new phone, the store rep pointing where to sign and initial the pages. My first words were to the man signing the papers. “Are you sure you want to do that?” The store rep looked at me as if I were crazy, which by that time was pretty much the case. But he listened to my story and suggested I send the phone back to the maker asking for a replacement. “That will cost $36.95 and take 3-5 days, and then you'll have to drive the thirty miles from home back to Ormond beach to pick up the phone.” Oh, super cool I thought; only five days more without a phone, and I get to pay. Why not send the new phone to the Sprint store where I live? For some reason they couldn’t do that, but they could send it to the Port Orange store.

After I had refilled my gas tank and driven once more to the Port Orange Sprint store I was told I couldn’t exchange the phone because the case has a small crack, though the crack was unrelated to the problem with the phone. The same man who had failed to repair the phone several days earlier looked closely at my face, saw something dangerous there and quickly offered, “Let me see what I can do.”

It was a post Easter miracle but he found and fixed the problem. According to him, the problem was not with the phone but with the Sprint network which had for reasons known only to God and the twelve disciples dropped all my data through a digital crack, and as far as Sprint was concerned I no longer existed. The ‘real sharp guy’ in Port Orange put all that data back into the network.

Have you ever wondered about hell on earth?