Phoney business

This is my last telecom story of the week and, I hope, the millennium:

Mom has been desperately in need of a cell phone since the concert incident. LoJack was an option, but Mom is a moving target who won't stay in one place when she gets lost. So I decided to get her a cell phone. My experience with Verizon Wireless has been less than stellar but a whole lot better than with Verizon's Dumb Stupid Losers department.

I love going into service institutions like banks and phone stores. The reps wear headsets like Madonna on tour and sit in front of kiosks that look like listening stations at Virgin. The young woman at the Verizon store who helped me was very pleasant but new. I overheard her tell a colleague that she wasn't scheduled to work that day. I smelled trouble.

I signed up for the family sharing plan. For only $10 extra a month, Mom and I can share minutes, and we don't count those used to call anyone else with a Verizon plan. One of the rep's more experienced colleagues walked her through the whole process, because she clearly didn't know which codes to enter or generally what to do. I think that's the only thing that saved me in the end from having a worthless prop.

The whole transaction took 20 minutes, at lunch time, on Wall Street. I was still wary. Back at the office, I tested the number, set up the voice mail, tried all the features--everything worked. I plugged in the charger and waited for the battery to fully charge. Three hours later I noticed that the battery still wasn't fully charged.

I noticed then that I had plugged the charger into the headphone jack on the left side of the phone. I didn't see any other slot where the charger could connect. The phone has a slot on the bottom that's plugged up. My Motorola phone has a jack like that, and I started thinking I'd been given the wrong charger.

Given my telecom from hell week, I knew the experience was too good to be true. But, hey, they at least had gotten the phone number to work. After work I went back to the Verizon store and stood in the tech support line to exchange the charger. I'd looked in the manual to see if I was missing something, but there was no mention of where to plug in the charger or how long to charge the phone. More mystifying was that the charger was wrapped in cellophane in the kit supplied by Verizon, so it wasn't as though the rep had given me a separate accessory,

I was on line about 5 minutes before I got to the service desk. "I got this phone here a few hours ago," I said, "and I think they gave me the wrong charger." Without even looking at the phone, the technician smiled. "No, sir, it's the right charger." I looked puzzled. He turned the phone over and pointed to a tiny little hole on the right side of the phone. "The charger goes in there," he said.

"Oh," I said, feeling the size of Vern Troyer, "thanks." I slunk away, turned on my heel, and marched out of the store, cursing myself for having taunted the telecom gods. They had the last laugh.