You’ll Thank Me Later

Rated R for language and malaise

Having come to the sudden but inevitable realization that not everyone in the world shares my irritating obsession with sublime passion for cell phones and communication in general, I’ve decided to branch out. Extend my range. Broaden my curmudgeontude, if you will.

I struggled with this one. I carefully considered form and subtext and theme, finally settling on a subject that cuts through all the crap and skewers the writhing remains of my perennial discontent firmly onto life’s specimen board, where it can squirm and make pathetic sqeeing noises as people peer at it with a cautious mix of revulsion and curiosity. The truly daring might even poke at it a few times. I call it;

Shit I Hate

Session One — Driving

I used to enjoy driving. The simple act of Going Somewhere, the freedom of four wheels on pavement, a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew on the seat beside me and no particular timetable to be followed, with seemingly endless miles of road unrolling before me as a metaphor for the untapped potential of youth, blah blah blah, whatever. Yeah, hey, you know what? The untapped potential of youth can go fuck itself; gas is how much now? Seventeen bucks a gallon? If you’re not smuggling a Fabergé egg in your Jockeys to help finance that latest sojourn to the mall or the Grand Canyon, you might as well stay home and live vicariously through other people. It’s cheaper and odds are that the bathrooms smell better.

I can’t drive past a bank of gas pumps without the bastards reaching out and grabbing the car like a band of marauding Ents, then violating it roughly with a disconcertingly phallic-shaped nozzle before shaking me down to the tune of $38 for the whole experience. I don’t know whether to be grateful that we’ve still got such a high standard of living or to slink back to my hotel room and cry on the floor of the shower until Nicholas Cage drinks himself to death.

And once I get past the whole “we live in a fairly convincing facsimile of a market economy so let’s all bend over like the petroleum-dependent whores that we are and let them stick it to us a few more times” thing, there’s the persistent notion that no one seems to know how the hell to drive anymore. People who match speeds on a two-lane one-way highway make me want to punch a fuckin’ nun, and should be beaten with a 1995 back-issue of Computer Shopper until public transportation becomes their only alternative.

I was taught that when someone creeps up onto my ass in my rear-view, it’s time to move the hell over and let them pass, because it’s neither my right nor my responsibility to assume the role of Self-Appointed Speed Limit Enforcement Douche while the 15 pissed-off commuters behind me entertain fantasies of my flaming, bullet-riddled demise. You have no idea why someone behind you might be in a hurry, and unless there’s turret lights on your roof and a Mossberg on your dash, your authority to hold me up hovers somewhere between “zero” and “eat a shit sandwich.”

For those of you whose favorite pastime is pulling your 6000-pound Ford Exfoliator into traffic and proceeding to drive at a pace that would send the Dalai Lama into fuck-sputtering fits of incoherence, I humbly submit that you might not require a ¼ scale reproduction of the QM2’s Grand Atrium as your daily driver. If the social pressure to captain your own ocean liner proves too great to resist, at least jog down to the engine room and have Mr. Andrews show you where the gas pedal is. Let’s nudge that bastard up to fourteen knots before the next stoplight, whaddaya say?

And don’t try to park that motherfucker, ever. Just don’t. Let it idle in the street while you row little Beaumont and Austin out to t-ball practice in the dingy.

Ah, parking. Sweet, sweet parking, how do I love thee? Like a ruptured hemorrhoid, you pain-in-the-ass, you. I adore the half-witted cheesebag who parks his Saleen Mustang Shelby Cobra GTS Twin-Turbo Dickmobile diagonally across two spaces so as to demonstrate his sexual inadequacy to the entire packed-to-the-tits mall parking lot on December 23rd. I guess the extra space allows the door to open wider and more easily accommodate the mullet and the leather pants.

I love the sloppy line-straddler, that careless moron who doesn’t quite take up two spaces, but instead makes it impossible to park next to him because he’s strayed into your space with his passenger side tires, and unless you want to start a chain reaction of shitty parking you’re forced to move on, all because Numbnuts couldn’t be bothered to turn the wheel a little sharper. Judging from the look of things he was probably munching a cheeseburger at the time, if the six-hundred-odd fast food bags and empty milkshake containers adorning the interior of his primer-gray Nova offer any reliable indication.

Finally, the dickhead di tutti dickheads, the sharpest, most succinct argument in favor of spontaneous roadside castration. No, not the drunk driver; we’ve heard plenty about him for the last fifty fuckin’ years; I’m talking about the biggest load of ambulatory backwash ever to ooze behind the wheel.

The green-light honker.

Yeah, you know the one. You’re sitting at a red light, maybe making a left turn, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. Your eyes are studiously glued to the traffic signal, because you know. You know the way you know about a bad hot dog; it’s going to happen, and you might not be held responsible for your actions. The cross traffic slows, then stops. The light turns green, you move your foot off the brake, and in the nanosecond before you can touch the gas, THE FUCKER BEHIND YOU HONKS HIS HORN.

To me, this is the automotive equivalent of getting smacked in the nose with a frozen otter. Nothing sees me reevaluating my distaste for incarceration and appraising the market value of my virgin bum quicker than an impatient bag of buffalo spooge who can’t lay off the horn. It’s completely irrational, as the horn is merely a sound; no harm to it at all, when you think about it. It simply says, “hey, asshole, the light is green and just in case you’re such a blind, incompetent jerkoff that you failed to notice, I’ll issue this terse yet blindingly annoying reminder.”

So I conjure every last shred of control in my body, and I sit there. I don’t move an inch until long after I’m damned good and ready (in fact, I was damned good and ready before the light even changed), not until I think the shithead behind me has had enough. Usually I can get him to bounce up and down, redfaced and livid, while I pick my nose or wait for a good Tito Puente track on a classic jazz station.

My long-term goal is to get my ass kicked by just the right person, then launch a line of t-shirts with a single, simple legend;

“I got Nut-Stomped by the Dalai Lama.”

La Donna T-Mobilé

Fewer than six weeks after signing up for a two-year contract plan with AT&T, I learned last night that Verizon has installed a soon-to-be-operational tower less than a mile away. They’re coming to the area with their Broadband PCS B-block holdings in MTA037, Submarket 3, which were acquired in FCC Auction 4 back in nineteen-ninety-friggin’-five. Who knew?

Being the unrepentant mobile geek that I am, for the last two years I’ve been drooling over a particular plot of land less than an eighth of a mile from where they eventually constructed the new PCS antenna, thinking it would make a great spot for a privately owned tower that could be leased to most, if not all, of the major carriers in the area. As previously noted, the closest tower is six miles from here, which in the words of Sister Teresa, my high school guidance counselor, sucks fermented llama balls.

To be certain, this is a sparsely populated region, and the probable ROI of installing equipment to serve fewer than 5000 people offers little appeal, even to me. The low population density coupled with the shorter range of the 1900 MHz frequencies makes me wonder just who Verizon is targeting with their new service, as Alltel is already deeply ensconced in the area as the carrier of choice for those living on the fringe (literally and metaphorically), and none of Verizon’s plans can compete with Alltel’s MyCircle offerings.

My first reaction to the Verizon news ran something along the lines of “hot diggety rhubarb crap,” but after careful scrutiny of their plans and service, my initial ebullience has waned somewhat to a lukewarm “meh,” with light-to-moderate “who-gives-a-shit” forming later in the day.

See, I’ve uncovered a secret.

Well, sure, not a real secret. Anyone can find out about it if they look in the right places, but it might as well be a secret to three out of the four big wireless companies. Rather, two of the three big companies if we don’t count Sprint, and with their recent sun-as-black-as-sackcloth tribulation, I’m not sure we should. All the more reason for those clowns to pay attention.

Wi-fi, baby.

T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home service allows customers to make calls over wi-fi, using either a specialized T-Mobile-branded router optimized for voice communication, or any off-the-shelf wireless router. Those on select two-year plans can opt to pay a $10 monthly fee for unlimited wi-fi calling from any open hotspot in the country, but anyone with a T-Mobile wi-fi-capable phone can use the service with their existing plan. Even those of us on prepaid.

When I first caught wind of this gig after it launched in the middle of last year, I raised a skeptical eyebrow and scoffed so hard I took out a condor in the Sonomas. We’ve all heard nightmare stories about VOIP quality and reliability, and now they want to charge me extra to connect to their shitty, poorly deployed network using my own router? I provide the connection and T-Mobile charges me to use it. Sure. Thanks, but no. I’ll call you. Or not.

After they changed their prepaid plans to allow unlimited nights and mobile-to-mobile for a dollar a day, I signed up. Not long after that, I tried the Samsung Katalyst on my home router using the pay-per-day plan, and it just works. It works hard. Like Scrubbing Bubbles on Red Bull and crystal meth.

Voice quality is clear, with very little compression noise, and the wi-fi connection is reliable. The phone does lose the network from time to time, but it seems to pick it up again in short order and maintains a minimum of 2 wi-fi signal bars anywhere in my house. Basically it’s like having a tower in the living room.

Are you listening, Sprint? A company with similar infrastructure liabilities (1900 MHz) found a way to overcome its most glaring shortcoming, a lack of adequate coverage, and turn it into what amounts to its most attractive feature. People aren’t fleeing Sprint in panicked droves because of the lack of a lightning-fast data network, but because of poor service. As far as the paying customer goes, “service” means coverage footprint, call quality/reliability, and selection of handsets. Anything else is incidental; if people are satisfied with those three things, you’re golden. With everything else being equal, the handset is of utmost importance, as it’s the end-user’s only daily physical representation of your service. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to evade the damaging association that a bad phone can wreak upon your network, whether fully justified or through simple consumer ignorance. And there’s no shortage of either bad handsets or ignorant consumers, believe me.

The call quality on the Katalyst is top-shelf, whether on PCS or wi-fi. T-Mobile coverage is now supremely adequate, and their MyFaves plans can be trumped only by Alltel’s MyCircle. T-Mobile offers a total of twelve free, no-rebate-required phones on their website. Sprint advertises exactly one free phone, the Sanyo SCP-3200, and their plan structure is confusing, at best. Having their voice plans listed in mutant sibling Nextel’s sandbox o’ poop and razorblades doesn’t help customers figure out what they want, either.

Part of Sprint’s trouble might be identity; when I look at their logo, I don’t know what the hell to think. Are they a phone company? A walkie-talkie company? A wireless company? Are they Sprint or are they Nextel? Why is all their stuff yellow and black? To me, yellow and black says “DANGER! FLEE!” and it might have a similar subconscious effect on others, as well.

With their HotSpot@Home service, T-Mobile has solidified its standing in the wireless industry as a provider that wants your money, sure, but they’re not too picky about how you access their network. Versatility, mission clarity, and perception of value are vital elements of success in any business, and now T-Mobile has each of those things stockpiled like illicit corned beef sandwiches during a national delicatessen emergency.

Certain other providers might want to peek over the fence to see what’s going on, before they’re remembered in the same breath with names like Omnipoint and Powertel, both of which are now part of Deutsche Telekom. And Deutsche Telekom is also the parent company of…

Anyone care to take a guess? Anyone?