So before my flight to Missouri I called up my wireless phone company. The premise was simple: What do I have to do to get my free nights and weekends to count when calling from MO to NJ? Simple question, right? Again I say, ha!
"You have to switch from local to national and even if you do switch to national you will still be charged Roaming fees unless you are in one of our covered areas and those are only in major cities and only major areas of major cities and sometimes there are extended area fees which means you're not with our company but you're with our partner and that only applies on alternate Tuesdays in February when frogs are falling from the sky." Or something like that.
So, that decided, the nice phone lady decides to look up where I'm going in Missouri to see if it would be covered under the national plan. Only problem is that between us, we have the combined geographical skills of a maimed fruit fly. She pulls up a map of the good old US of A and asks me, "Where's Missouri?"
"West," I tell her confidently, being that NJ is on the east coast, so that most everything is west.
"Is it by the Great Lakes?" she wants to know.
"Down, I think," I tell her.
Finally, she decides to stop looking for it on the map and just type it in. "Is Missouri MO or MI?" she asks.
"MO, I think."
"I thought that was Montana."
"Montana's MT, I think."
"Oh."
So we find the state and we find the town and it will be free under the national plan and everything's going so well, right? Ha!
I get to Missouri (it's MO, by the way) and I enjoy the first week of my vacation with my brandy-new, national free nights and weekends (for which I had to extend my contract another two months). A week into my trip I am on the phone with my roommate when the display switches from the phone company name to that dreaded word, "Roam". I tell her to hold on, I stand up off the bed and -no joke -I spin around once in a circle and Roam is gone, once again replaced by the innocent company logo.
At this point, I panic. Why would my phone randomly switch to Roam and back when I haven't even moved? What if it's done this while I was in the middle of a three-hour supposed-to-be-free conversation? Will I get Roam charges on this vacation, even after all I've been through to avoid that very horror?
Back on the phone with the wireless company. "Blah blah blah assisting other blah blah approximately ten minutes." Yay. Eventually some guy stops the painful elevator music and I ask him how my phone can change areas when it hasn't moved half an inch. "Oh," he says, "that means you have to turn your phone off and on three times in a row (click your heels together three times...) to reset the blah blah blah."
Oh. Of course. Why didn't I think of that?