diePhone and the Fuzz

As much as it pains me to say it, the iPhone sucks. I was an early iPhone adopter, with an excuse. At the time the iPhone came out I was living with a Cell Phone and an MP3 player that had broken screens, but I had been using them both for long enough when their screens broke, that they were still fairly useful (assuming the person I was sending a text message to knew that I had no screen and therefore was relying solely on T9 to get the right word.) My other excuse was that the day the iPhone went on sale, I was 8 days deep into a construction support stint in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico with no better way to pass the down time than watching bootleg movies and reading blogs and waiting for the iPhone sales countdown timer, and nothing to spend money on except poker losses. A few weeks later when it arrived, I stayed up all night playing with it, and had to take the next morning off.

The first thing that went wrong with the iPhone started happening after I’d had it about a month. While browsing the internet or whatever, it would just boot you back to the home screen, but that seemed to stop after the first firmware update. Also for some reason they messed up the headphone jack so sometimes when you pulled the headphone plug out, it wouldn’t realize and the regular phone speaker would appear to be dead when in call mode. Then after a few more months it would occasionally lock up and it would need to be rebooted. This was when my enthusiasm for the iPhone started to wane. Crashing is a perfectly acceptable and normal phenomenon for any computer, but when you take your phone out of your pocket and are in dire need of making a call, your phone needs to make the call and having to restart your phone is simply unacceptable. Apple then updated the firmware again which not only seemed to solve that problem (except in one bar where it would always crash.) They also added a few new features which in retrospect should have been there from the get go (multiple recipient text messages? That’s fucking genius! Being able to move the buttons on the home screen? Take that Blackberry!) I thought that the new updates were cool for about a week or so until I noticed that there was about a half inch strip at the top of the screen that no longer responded to touch. Now, to be fair, I must say that the deadening of the screen happened somewhere in the two weeks before Mardi Gras, and it’s a chore to keep your phone for those two weeks to say nothing of keeping it out of harms way. Regardless, I was able to go online and find others who reported not only the same problem but even the same area of the touch screen.

At this point I called customer service and they were very helpful and sent me a box to return the phone in so they could check it out. They returned it unfixed because of a faint dimple where the case I use has a metal snap. I pleaded my case to customer service stating that the dent was the result of normal use and not a drop nor had the phone been misused, and was told to take pictures of the case and phone and they’d think about it. I put off doing so because I’m kind of a lazy person and I had figured out how to squeeze the most out of the phone without that top say 25% of the screen.

Yesterday I woke up and attempted to make a call only to find that where the phone normally says how many service bars it was registering none. Worried that I may have forgotten to pay my cell phone bill, I popped out the SIM card and put it into my old phone (the one with the broken screen that my iPhone-spoiled fingers can no longer type blind text messages on) which worked fine allowing to make calls from the very same location that the iPhone reported no service.

I promptly took the pictures that the customer service guy requested and am currently getting all the venom out so I can send them to him with an accompanying email that is as polite as possible.

In an unrelated story, I locked myself out of my apartment the other day and had to break in by busting a window and unlocking it, then crawling through. At some point in the process, unfortunately, someone called the cops on me. Maybe it was the guy who walked by me, to whom I commented: “You know, it turns out these apartments are wicked hard to break into.” Or, maybe it was someone else. Anyways, the cops rolled up three deep as I was sweeping up the broken glass, and asked only to briefly see my ID. I’m almost positive that if I had been doing anything other than sweeping glass when they showed up they would have run my ID through the computer, the results of which would be interesting to me and possibly them. Yesterday I saw a black seventeen year-old who got sent through the computer and then (illegally) searched for no reason in the middle of Canal St. In a few months he's naming his first daughter Justice. I hope he keeps his optimism almost as much as I hope Justice lives in a better world than he does, but I doubt both very much.