Caveat: part 4

Caveat six: read the small print

            When we bought my iPhone, they talked us into buying Apple Care for it, and both Chaz and I walked away with the understanding that this was insurance even against loss and accident.  “But you have to remember to REGISTER it,” the very clean cut and masterful young salesman told us.  “Uh-huh,” we said, staring down at the very large screen of our new piece of advanced technology.  When they sell you Apple Care, what they are actually selling you is a box.  A small, very lightweight box.  When you open it, you find a folded up bit of paper much like the one you get in medicine bottles – which you instantly throw away since the font is too small to read, knowing that, even if you read it, you wouldn’t understand a thing printed on it.

Really, though, I did save the paper.  I saved it on my desk for weeks.  For the weeks when my dad and my sister and my daughter and my grandson moved through this house like changes of weather and my two veins were blown up and killed and the bills were caught up on and the car key thing was happening.  I saw it three days ago, I swear.

Then I cleaned up the desk, which is always a dicey thing.

 So when I got serious about my Urgent Checklist of Things I’ve Let Slide and resolved to register that Apple Care, the paper was long gone.  It didn’t worry me much.  I’ve bought tons of Apple Computers and cell phones over the years and I know that it’s always the BOX you tragically throw away – along with all the serial numbers and any chance in heck of getting a rebate.  And I STILL HAD THE BOX.

But of course, it turns out that what I needed was the paper.  It had what I’d paid for on it: the registration number.  About the time I realized this, I started getting this terrible nudging feeling that something really terrible was going to happen to my cell phone THAT VERY NIGHT.  The feeling kept flying back into my face the way the flies at the barn do.  So I called Apple Care and laid the problem out before them.

 Happily, as I had the receipt and the box with all its numbers and the serial number of the phone (which the phone carries in its own innards) they could, in fact, register me.  Great relief.  Because I still had that nagging, buzzing little feeling.

That night, there was a Town Hall Meeting.  I didn’t want to go to it.  I hate meetings of any kind.  But, by jingo, I AM an American and sooner or later you have to prove it.  G couldn’t go because he had to work.  Chaz couldn’t go because she had mono.  So I had to go.  Because what if I didn’t go and there was NOBODY THERE TO PROTEST AGAINST THE HEALTH CARE THING?

Laugh.  Go ahead.  I live in the reddest state ever.  Which is why I was so tempted to stay home.  It wasn’t like there weren’t going to be 50K people there all pretty much on the same side of the thing I’m on. Or at least, approximately the same side.  Or sort of.  But you can’t be that kind of person, can you – in good conscience?  Not go because somebody else will probably do the job for you anyway?

 So I went.  Spitting and cursing and wanting it to be over – but a teeny bit curious to find out if there’d be any fun and unexpected fireworks.  I had to park pretty far away, on a curb outside a commercial building.  Jumped out of my new car (for which I now have three keys, one of them the valet one) and dashed illegally across one of the busiest streets in town (where there was a corner but no cross walk) – all the time wondering if I really wanted to have to go back this way in the dark – and ran like the wind to get to the theater to find a seat.

 Found a seat next to a nice older lady (could she have been my age?????) who was also alone.  Settled into my seat, shifted my bag – only to realize that I had no iPhone sticking out of the iPhone pocket.  “My phone,” I said, wondering how the devil I’d come away without it, and pretty sure I’d put it in there.  I searched the entire bag several times.  Not there.

 I left my stuff with the lady (hoping she really WAS a nice lady) and ran like a storm back roughly the way I’d come.  Had to be in the car, right?  Wasn’t in the car.  Ran back to the theater.  I’d done a mile easy in five minutes.  Used the lady’s phone to call home.  Chaz couldn’t find the phone.  Used the lady’s phone to call my phone.  Chaz couldn’t hear it. Neither could I.  So I gave up on  the meeting (see how committed I am to politics?) and ran back to the car, searching as I went.  Nothing.

Drove home.  Looked in the bathroom, on the desk.  “Not here,” Chaz said.  Cam was there.  “Wait,” he said, tearing open his shirt to show a shiny logo on the suit beneath.  “I have ADVANCED TECHONOLOGY!!”  And sure enough, his MobileMe account (really?  Mobile ME?) had GPSed my phone, locating it EXACTLY WHERE I’D PARKED in the first place.

Threw the baby into the back of Cam’s car, roared back into town.  I KNEW somebody was going to steal the thing.  Just knew it.  Chaz had sent it a message that would flash on the screen: KRISTEN HAS LOST THIS PHONE – HELP!!!!

We tore through town, found the curb empty (there had been a truck there too, now gone – probably WITH MY PHONE).  But Chaz was refreshing the MobileMe and said, “Still there.”  We got out, searched the curb, the grass, the corner to the North.  We were quartering the place like blood hounds.  BUT NOTHING.

 I ran across the no-cross-walk street again – following an odd sound.  And Cam was yelling from the curb, “I hear it.  I hear it!!”  But I couldn’t hear anything on the other side.  So I came back.  Then heard it clearly.  Started across again.  By this time, there’s a cop on the other side of the street, just pulling somebody over for speeding.  Not for jay-walking.  And then I stop in the middle of the street, ears pricked.  And there, in the middle of the two south bound lanes, is my phone, lying on its face on the street.

“Oh HONEY!!” I cried.  (Actually I did not cry that.) I picked it up, turned it over, and was astonished to find that its face was now a mass of white jagged lines.  I tried wiping them off, but – “It’s shattered,” Cam explained gently, prying it out of my hands.

            Oh, mama, just wasn’t it, though?

            So home I went.  Cam took the baby home.  Chaz sucked in her breath at the ugliness of the damage.  I called Apple Care.  I was embarrassed to do it.  You can’t just “remember” to register one day and then—woops—wreck your phone two hours later.  Not without sounding like a stinking liar.  So in the middle of the story I was telling them, I burst into tears.

 Which was just stupid because, of course, Apple Care doesn’t pay for actual DAMAGE.  Like being run over (which my phone was not, miraculously.  In fact, the screen kept coming alive, suggesting earnestly that I slide and unlock.  But you can’t slide and unlock if your screen is dead.  It was pitiful, really.).

But what they can do is check it out, and if its repairable, send you a replacement for $200 – which is $50 MORE than I paid for it in the first place.  “But that was with a contract, Ma’am,” they said, very kindly.  I was really having a problem with this whole you-buy-it-from-AT+T-but-you’re-talking-to-Apple thing.  I don’t think it’s right, actually,  Like, they assume that EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS?  I’ve owned TONS of cell phones, and I never had to talk to Apple about them.  I talked to T-Mobile and Sprint and Verizon and AT+T.

I think people develop Alzheimer’s as a defense strategy.

So Apple told me what to do.  They were doing me an AppleCare favor by not charging me 500 bucks for a new phone, is what they were doing.  And they said I could just take it back to the store where they’d assess the damage and take care of the problem right there, or I could wait for the post paid overnight box.  I thought they meant the AT+T store at the mall (see?  Still not getting’ it), but they meant the Apple store – the only one in FOUR FLIPPING STATES that’s an hour drive to the north.  So I opted for the overnight box.  If I wanted them to simply send a new phone to me right away, they needed a visa number.  And if my phone turned out to be a total loss, they’d either charge me for a new one or send the pieces back – I declined that.

Then I called AT+T for advice.  They said, “Call the store, dummy.”  So I called the store – but that’s another story altogether.

I do not have pictures of any of this. I was supposed to take a picture of the crashed phone, but I never stopped long enough to do it.  I also no longer have pictures of the cool tile floor at the Springville Art Museum or of the cool needlework project I shot for Rachel, because they are all on the phone that is now on its limping way to refurbishment.