CellPhone: The Triumphant Return

For those of you who are wondering what happened to my cellphone, it is in good hands: namely, my own. Apparently it fell out of my jeans pocket when I was lugging 20-kg bags of icing sugar from point A (the pile of sugar bags) to point B (the mixing bowl). It slid beneath a prep table. It was set to vibrate. It had landed in a pile of icing sugar, which muffled the already-subtle sounds of a vibrating cellphone. Every time I tried to phone it to pinpoint its location, it vibrated itself a bit further under the table. I spent 2 days cellphoneless, during which I discovered that payphones cost 50 cents per call, and no one in the mall will give you change for a Toonie. One of my wonderful co-workers found the phone, and it was eventually returned to me.

While we're on the subject of cellphones, remember that time I started a private war with Virgin Mobile? And how in the end they promise my cheque was in the mail and would be on my doorstep by the end of September? Yeah, it's still not here. Erg. I dread calling them again.

Apocalypse? Now?

I have officially lost my cellphone*. I am very concerned.

I am concerned for several reasons. The first reason is that I spent most of my very frustrating Friday doing my best to sign away my soul to the holiday retail industry, and on every application form, my preferred form of contact is 'by phone'. While the chances that someone would hire me at this late date are fairly slim, so long as my phone is gone I will be convinced that there are messages on it from Toys R Us, HMV, and Walmart, all offering me unrealistically high wages to help them stack boxes into colourful pyramids for the month of December (that's what happens in the retail industry, right?).

The second reason I am worried about my cellphone disappearing is that, as I now live in a place where there is no landline, I really have few options when it comes to phoning people, or having people phone me, and I am sure that this week will be a vitally important phone-call week for me, for some reason**.

Third is the very perplexing circumstances under which my cellphone disappeared. I know I had it on the way to work. I was in Shoppers Drugmart buying a variety of items meant to keep the bakery bleach water from peeling the skin off my hands, and I took my phone out to check the time and it said 6:54 on it. So I know that at 6:54 this morning, I still had my phone. Then, things get hazy. Somewhere between paying for hand lotion and turning on the oven at work, my phone just disappeared.

What is even more confusing is that I have reason to believe I was sleep-text-message-reading last night. The details of this are far too long and confusing to get into here***, but I am convinced that my subconscious mind was playing some fun tricks on me last night. Ergo, I cannot trust my early-morning memory, meaning I'm not actually entirely certain if I checked the time on my phone this morning. I could have hallucinated it. Maybe my brain already knew my phone was gone and was so concerned about it that I day-dreamed that I still had it! And checked the time! And also read a few text-messages that were new but had somehow already been mysteriously opened.

Seeing as how I no longer trust my own brain, I can't rule out the possibility that I left my phone under my bed (checked) in the fridge (checked), in a snowbank (like in Fargo. Did not check, unlike that confused lady who thought Fargo was real), in the oven (please, no), in a cupcake (I would like to thank my roommate for that suggestion), in the hands of a greedy Shoppers employee (checked. twice. should have looked more closely for shifty eyes), hidden amongst the packages of rubber gloves in Shoppers' Aisle 2, or really anywhere else in Winnipeg by now. Now I'm not going to get a job over the holidays. Instead I will be forced to sit in an armchair inventing bizarre Christmas-themed drinks using ingredients my roommate left lying around carelessly--like vanilla or diet coke or organic shampoo--and watching pirated Christmas movies on my laptop. All because of this stupid phone. Oh dear what shall I do?

*as opposed to three days ago when I 'lost my phone' and it was hiding in a fold of my duvet the entire time.

**Wow. That's all one sentence.

***really, it involves an argument that I thought was with one person but was actually with another, an apology text-message, a cat, and a dream about me being an award-winning poet with a collection of 2-foot-tall Disney Princess dolls.

Beware the Virgin

On Thursday and Friday, Virgin Mobile was handing out free sandwiches on the corner. They had two ‘virgins’ dressed up in microscopic skirts the colour of the Devil himself, trying to convince people that free pork sandwiches were somehow an incentive to sign away their souls to the most vile of cellphone companies I have ever had to deal with*.

As I scarfed down my free sandwich and pasted my Virgin Mobile sticker onto the “Trash In Here” sign for one of the public garbage cans, I began to wonder. Why exactly do I hate Virgin? During our 14-month relationship, what exactly was it that irked me so much about them? Was it the monthly phonecalls to ask why they had screwed up my bill this time? Was it the fact that, during these monthly phonecalls, I was put on hold for at least 20 minutes and subjected to a putrid mixture of the hold-line “pumped up mix” (badly dubbed rap beats) and the smooth, sultry voice of a sex-line operator reassuring me that someone would be along to “take care of” me any minute? And that, once I was finally taken off of hold, I would, without fail, discover that whatever pathetic little virgin lackey had been forced into dealing with me had absolutely no idea what to do with me and would immediately put me back on hold again? The fact that they didn’t end my contract when they said they were going to, and I didn’t find out until I got the bill for 2 months of phone time I hadn’t used? That, when I called to get that fixed up, they put me on hold for so long I finally hung up on them and just paid the *$%@ bill? That when they finally realized I was leaving them, they passed me on to the one competent, polite, amusing, useful service agent they had and that the matter that no one else in the world could solve was settled with one single push of a button?

See, signing a contract with Virgin Mobile is like committing yourself to a relationship with a worthless skeezebag. A skeezebag named V. V seems nice and reasonable when you first meet him. Maybe you say you’re looking for something casual—something pay-as-you-go, if you will. But V is so charming that he eventually convinces you that you want to be with him always. Or at least for a year-long contract. See, V is a controlling bastard. He doesn’t want you to be tempted by anyone else’s services. He wants you to be all his. As soon as you agree to be exclusive with V, though, he seems to forget you exist. As long as you’re his on paper, as long as you’re stuck with him, as long as you’re paying the bills for him, he doesn’t give a damn about you. V doesn’t call you when he says he will. When you call him, he reassures you he has no idea why you’re angry, or what you’re talking about, and of course he’d never go behind your back and charge you for some other girl’s minutes, and of course he’ll call you later to sort this all out. He doesn’t call. You try to email him, but he seems to have forgotten who you are, and that you two were even in a relationship to begin with. Until he needs money, that is

So you put up with it for a while. You put up with it for longer than any reasonable person would. After a year, you think it’s over. You guys have stopped talking, you never text anymore, you’ve put your phone in the drawer and called it quits. And then, you get a phonecall from V. Asking for money. And, like an idiot, you give it to him. And when you call wanting to break it off with him and get your fifty bucks back, well, then he’s all smiles and promises. He begs you to stay. He promises to buy you lots of minutes—free! When you finally get him to realize that it’s over between you two, he assures you he’ll give the money back pronto. You guys can still be friends. And then...he doesn’t.

I was with V long enough to get wise to all these little tricks. Virgin Mobile have created a wall of bad music, slutty voice recordings and dazed, clueless customer service agents, a wall of frustration so impenetrable that no one can stand to stay on the phone line with them long enough to ever settle anything the first time round. Which is why, 8 months after saying goodbye to them, Virgin Mobile still owes me $53.67. I cut my service in December, and was assured by the one service agent of shockingly moderate competence that my cheque would be arriving in the mail within the month.

January came and went, and I phoned them again. After spending 30 minutes listening to the worst Black-Eyed-Peas remix known to man, I was finally informed that it actually takes 90 days for a reimbursement. So much for moderate competence. So I waited. And waited. And waited. And eventually, mercifully, I forgot about it. My blood pressure resumed a healthy level. I no longer waited in fearful anticipation of the day when I would once again have to wrestle with those virgin bastards.

And then yesterday, I saw the sad little Virgin streetwalkers** with their stickers and sandwiches, and 5 months of past-due rage was once again awakened within me. A BBQ sauce-soaked sanwich the size of a loonie couldn’t solve this one.

For an entire day, I resisted the urge to phone. I tried to convince myself that $50 was worth it to never have to deal with those demonic con artists again. But it was the principle of the thing. And $50 can buy a lot of things. Things that have nothing to do with Virgin Mobile. I sat in anticipation of the moment I would get home and phone the sexed-up customer service phone line for the umpteenth time. How long would I be on hold today? Which innocent service agent’s soul would I crush this time? There were enough horrifying possibilities to make my head explode.

I’ll give you the abridged version of the 43-minute runaround V gave me today. The long and short of it is that the man of mild competence who finally cut my service in December clearly doesn’t work there anymore. They still play the shittiest hold music known to man, except now it has skips in it, as though they ripped it off of some Columbia House Music CD their 12-year-old bother bought 7 years ago and left on the kitchen table for the cat to sleep on and the dog to eventually eat. Their service team has been lobotomized. On top of this, while their records show that I cut my service in December***, their records ALSO show that they only actually terminated my account in April. For 4 months, they sat there waiting for me to have second thoughts and come back to them. And then, to top it all off, when they finally realized that I wasn’t coming back and cut me off, they took all that money they owed me and they mailed it to HALIFAX.

Honest mistake, you say? I did buy the phone in Halifax to begin with, you say? The fact that I’d been in Winnipeg since the previous April and had told them that twice can be overlooked, you say? I swear, the service agents aren’t even given computer keyboards over there. They sit in front of black screens clicking their clicky pens to make it sound as though they are actually transcribing the information that customers are giving them.

I have once again been reassured that my money will be here within a month. We’ll just see about that, won’t we?

The worst part of all this, though, the absolute worst part, is that when my MTS contract runs out in September, I want to sign on with a phone company that actually works outside of Manitoba. One that does prepaid phone plans. One that is cheap. And I already have this Virgin Mobile phone... apparently the Virgin Mobile Frontal Lobotomy can be performed through a phone line.

What do you think? Should I call them and see if they want to be friends with benefits? Or should I just ram my face through a cheese grater several times in the hopes of regaining some of my dignity? I just don’t know.

*Granted, cellphone companies are inherently evil to begin with. It’s funny, they seem to be one of the only services left where the concept of ‘customer service’ remains completely foreign.

**Gee, maybe your employees would care a bit more about the quality of the service they give if you gave them the dignity of not dressing them up like Buffy the Vampire Layer and stick them on downtown streetcorners during rush hour so that 60-year-old business men can ask them if those sandwiches come with a free handjob.

***Citing Buyer’s Remorse. At least they got THAT right.