Tech Support

"I'd rather have my credit card stolen than lose my phone."

Yea, I said it.  I'd also prefer that my husband forget his keys at home than his cell phone.  Something he kindly obliged to do yesterday.

Which rather fortuitously meant that at least one of us had a working phone.  Because my phone spontaneously shut itself off.  And then it began this interesting process of turning on halfway, blacking out its screen and then vibrating on a regular basis like a mad man, slowly rocking back and forth in fear of the visions they cannot help but see.

I have no idea what kind of visions my phone might have been seeing, but it was clearly possessed, vibrating in an unending, maniacal rhythm.

And thus began an cyclical attempt to fix it:  Take battery out. Wait 30 seconds.  Put battery in.  Watch phone almost start again.  Repeat, with incrementally longer wait periods.

And then I tried to boot holding the volume and power buttons.  Nope.  Even safe mode isn't safe.

Half an hour later, I'm on the phone with T-mobile (ironic, yes?  Thankfully, I was at my sister's and she understandably let me use her phone).  The T-mobile guy was actually pleasantly willing to skip the basics (Have you tried turning it on and off again?).  It probably helped that I know and correctly use words like "safe mode" and "boot."  Oh, and that I noticed the yellow DOS-like font on the screen not whether the main screen Android was on a skateboard or not.  (Yes, this was a serious question.)

Side note: Did you know that there is an honest to gosh litmus test in the phone to tell them whether or not you're lying about dropping your phone in the swimming pool?  Now you do.

Twenty minutes later, T-mobile agrees the phone is lost to us. They promise to next-day deliver a $5 replacement.  Warranties don't promise that it won't be on backorder, though.  But I still can't complain about 5 day turn around period and an excellent tech support dude.

Plus, a very gracious friend invited me to try her phones (it took three until we found one that both accepted my SIM card and was able to produce the other caller's voice without using speakerphone) to see if one would work for the interim.

In sum?  My phone has gone mad.  A replacement will arrive sometime next week.  Until then, t9 and I are reacquainting ourselves.