Phones, phones

Upon our return to the US from France we had in our possession SIM cards from four countries for our unlocked phones: the UK, France, Italy and the US. Of course only the US SIM card (T-Mobile) would work in the States but we thought now that we were back for some months what would we do about "serious" phone service? T-Mobile is not the most reliable of carriers and their coverage is very spotty particularly in the Northeastern US.

Two days after we landed in Boston we headed over to Millbury Centre, a typical American mall not far from where we were staying at Dick and Dorothy's house and started checking out our options.

Verizon was top on our list since we had their wireless and wired service when wwe lived in Vermont and thought highly of their customer service. But a walk in their store at Millbury Centre and we were immediately put off by the sales staff so we drove across the street to the Cingular store. Twenty minutes later we walked out with new SIM cards for a two-year contract family plan program, and we could use our old phones.

Several days later we were up in Maine visiting family and checking out a possible job opportunity for Susie (now a reality for the summer) and noticed that we couldn't get any coverage in the area where we will be spending the summer: Winter Harbor and Schoodic Point, across the bay from Bar Harbor.

After leaving Maine we returned to Dick and Dorothy's house in Massachusetts for one night before heading out to the Midwest and so we stopped in the Cingular store to register our problem. There was only one person working and she was pretty much overwhelmed with a constant stream of phone calls, while customers continued to come in to either talk about phones or (like us) discuss a problem.

We were faced with a choice: we could either buy two Cingular phones, thus in theory giving us better service or we could cancel our contract. When we signed up we had 30 days to test drive Cingular's service and frankly we were concerned that if we did opt for the new phones, and it would be several weeks before we would be back in Maine to run our test again and thereby past the 30-days' deadline, we would, in effect, be screwed.

So we opted out. We thanked the young woman and cancelled our service right there and then. C'est la vie, eh?

Now we were back to square one and had just an hour or so before we hit the big trail west. What to do?

We returned to Verizon and were pleasantly surprised this time: friendly sales staff, lots of tech support in-house -- in fact there were probably more than a half dozen people working there that morning -- and a half hour later out we went with new phone service and two new phones.

So now we have Verizon service -- like half of our family -- and couldn't be happier.

Well I suppose we could be if we were back in Paris. . .

Wish you were here,

Steve