One Emblematic Morning in Modernity

[begun yesterday, interrupted - finished today]
I am sitting at the kitchen counter waiting for the Mint Mobile eSIM to come alive in my wife’s now-unlocked iPhone. We have two existing phone #'s - one for me and one for her; both on one account with me as the account holder. The fact I’m being very detailed is not without reason, as you’ll see. Both lines have been on the TMobile 55+ plan at $70/month, unlimited talk, text and data, tax included with automatic monthly debit. Until, that is, TMobile broke their solemn promise to ‘never’ raise our rate, which they did two months ago. My complaints to TM went unanswered, as did my letter to the FTC informing them of TM’s act of “fraud in the inducement” - that is they induced me to contract with them with the false rate guarantee.

I explored alternatives and found Mint Mobile prepaid. We use our phones about 98% on WiFi. Over the past two years, I checked and neither of us has ever used more than 1GB of cellular data in any one month. So, for $15/month/line (+ tax), on each line we get 5GB data, unlimited talk & text; a savings of $50/month. A non-insignificant fringe benefit is the righteous pleasure of getting rid of TMobile. I am aware that Mint uses TMobile’s tower network & may still receive some revenue. However it is much reduced.

So, anticipating that porting over our long-held phone numbers would be a challenge (and likely frustrating), I asked my adult son, Jonathan, to come over (he lives across town) to help me. He’s here. The “simple” process started at 08:30am. It’s now 11:06am and counting. The simple process begins with having each phone connect to the cell signal with WiFi turned off. There’s problem #1. At my house, a hill is between me and the nearest cell tower, so I usually get 1 or 2 bars of LTE service. Rarely, I see 1 or 2 bars of 5G. Long story short. it turned out to be sufficient despite my anxiety, but there’s more to the story.

To port out a number, TM doesn’t make it easy. First, I had to search through the menus to find out where I could obtain a temporary port out PIN, which process also involved many steps. I wasn’t sure if the same PIN would work for both lines, since each line must be ported out independently and each line becomes its own separate account on Mint. Fortunately, in reading numerous accounts of this process, I learned that it was essential to port out the account holder’s phone number LAST. That’s because as soon as TM receives the port out request from another company, it instantly closes the entire account - all lines. This means that if I ported my number first, the account would have ceased to exist and my wife’s number might be lost. It turned out that the same PIN did work for both lines.

Anyway, I did her number first, having provided both the PIN and my TM account number, and decided to wait to do mine until hers was complete. So, I get a page in the Mint app on her phone telling me transfer was “in progress” but could take up to 48 hours. After about 2 hours, I called Mint support and discovered - as I suspected - the process had hung up. After deleting the old TM eSIM on her phone, I quickly got an email from Mint with a QR code. This quickly worked its magic and her phone was connected to Mint and working! I then did mine, with learned amendment to the process and it took only 3 minutes!

Before I did my number, I went into the laundry room off the kitchen. There, we have a fairly new GE top-freezer second refrigerator. Having experience (bad) with the brand and with complex units, I bought the simplest one I could find - “garage ready” with not even an ice maker. Anyway, it turns out this refrig takes cold air from the freezer and meters it down to the refrigerator compartment with an automatic baffle of some kind to regulate the desired temp. I had noticed previously that when the door to the refrigerator compartment closes, the freezer door - rather consistently - pops open about a quarter inch (and usually closes itself). A month ago, I found the freezer door ajar (1/4 inch), enough to have lost significant cooling. I assumed something must have blocked its closure and adjusted the freezer contents. Wrong!

So yesterday, I found it ajar again, such that all the formerly frozen solid contents were defrosted - no longer frozen solid! I will try to use them, but will do so carefully; it’s about $150 worth of food. This, of course, is another failure of a complex system and I write to document what is an all-but daily example of failure of almost every kind of device or service. Literally nothing reliably works as it should. Without exaggeration, hardly a day passes without an event such as these stealing my time, my effort and my scarce serenity.

Sad to say, these events punctuate (as in an exclamation point!!) my longstanding sense I inhabit a culture which is rapidly unwinding, literally falling into tatters. Even worse, a compelling case can be made this destruction of a once decent, imperfect but self-critical and improving society - has been and still is being deliberately sabotaged by a cult in pursuit of raw power; and they are boldly doing it - just as they explicitly advertise - “by any means necessary”. What I’ve described here is but some small evidence from the front lines of life. Our collapse will likely turn out to be the best-documented and most clearly foreseeable one ever - if, indeed, anyone survives it to tell the story - the history of this - the final fall of Western Civilization.

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I recently switched to Mint Mobile in March. I have been somewhat satisfied but coverage varies based on location or neighborhood. It is cheap and no long term contract. I will continure my Mint Mobile experiment for another 3 months.

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I have not done it yet, but I plan to leave TM soon. I pay them $51.64 a month. I will save your experience as a text file to guide me. I too would like to retain my number, (used on various carriers over the last 20+ years with the last four digits of 4444 )

That happened to me, but I can attribute it to a clogged lint filter on my gas dryer. The flame would not ignite and the clothes in the dryer were wet. Actually by the third time only drying with air since no flame from the gas, just pretty damp.

I called a plumber friend asking if he knew an inexpensive gas dryer repair person. He went on to tell me that there is a non-resetable thermal fuse inside the dryer that sometimes opens because of excessive heat. I should take the back of the dryer off and test the fusible link with an ohm meter, if it’s open a new one could be had at somewhere between $25 and $50.

Well I needed the clothes dried so I bypassed the link and taped up the ends with electrical tape to run it and get my clothes dried.

The next step was to go to old faithful Amazon where I found that I can get two of them for $3.99 with free shipping under Prime.

This is one of those things, that could have cost me $150 to $430 for a repairman.

Yes it’s one of those things that a built in safety device could have been engineered to be self resettable, ( sorry appliance repair people, retired is not only a state of mind, it’s something that necessitates saving money in any way possible. )

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This seems rather like a movie that Woody Allen never made … but should have. The door opens, and the person outside sees the beautiful people having fun inside, but before he can step through – the door slams shut again.

Years ago, if one moved to a new city or a new state with a different landline provider, one got a new phone number. It was a nuisance, but that was that!

Then, with advancing technology, it became possible to move anywhere and keep the same number. We liked it! And now that privilege is being withdrawn under a blanket of confusion. It is as if the person in Woody Allen’s non-movie actually got to step into the room with the beautiful people for a few happy minutes before being roughly tossed back outdoors into the dark.

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Been on consumer cellular for years; it’s cheap reliable good coverage and great service.

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As it happens, today I can tell you a related story from the world of landlines. Yes, I still have a landline – the sound quality is so much better. Strange to think that AT&T worked for decades on improving phone sound quality – and now it turns out that most people don’t care.

My ever-dependable landline failed today – no dial tone. I did what all residents of a rural area know to do in these circumstances – I took a phone outside the house to the TIN (Telephone Interface Network) where the phone company’s lines meet the house wiring and plugged it in. No dial tone, proving definitively that the problem was somewhere upstream in the phone company’s network, not in the house wiring.

One might think that if there is a problem with one’s phone service, one could talk to someone about it … maybe over a phone? But no! The only way to communicate with the phone company is on-line, where the frustrated customer gets to “chat” with a Large Language Model.

The interesting part is that the LLM of course pretends it is a real person. The phone company gave this LLM the persona of “Abhishek P”, presumably so that the customer would think that at least he is chatting with a real human being, even if she is in India.

The days of AT&T and Bell Labs personnel making stunning breakthroughs and winning Nobel Prizes are far behind us now. But just look at how the stock market has climbed, you ungrateful customer!

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