My Grandmother was supposed to call AT&T and ask if there were any discounts that she could get, because she retired from there. She called and got the run down, and the short answer was “no”, but they did offer a family plan, and to be honest I’m not even sure if it is in fact called a “family plan”, that would save us some money.

The representative she was speaking to was extremely pushy about the whole thing. I am not a big fan of walking into a situation where the sales people make commission. I don’t care what the reasoning behind this practice is, I would prefer that I can shop at my leisure. I told my Grandmother to hang up, and I would think about it.

I decided that there was no real reason for us to stay with Verizon, since there are certain features that I am sort of interested in playing around with, not the least of these being GPS for the purpose of track log software, and so I said that we might as well.

She called, we are apparently signed up, and since we already have AT&T for our home phone and internet it’s going to be automatically added to our phone bill. I need a phone, because I need to cancel with Verizon.

Jo, Anthony, and I all end up driving out to the AT&T store in Fairlawn to look at phones and decide what my best option is going to be. Quickly, thanks to the fact that GPS was a necessity, the search for a phone was narrowed down considerably. Then those phones started falling out of favor quickly, one of them has a required $30 a month data plan, another phone is $250, and finally another phone is as wide as my hand, and quite hilariously that’s the one I was going to get, but it’s actually misconstrued in the pictures on the website (hint: the circle D pad is oval in the picture on the website for AT&T making it look considerably slimmer). The best phone ended up being the Blackjack II.

I must have spent quite a lot of time getting to that point and finally the sales person needed some information. I was getting the information he needed when time apparently ran out. The store closes at 8 PM. I had no idea, otherwise I would have felt a bit more decisive, and instead of playing with things in the store that I had no intention of getting I would have gone straight to narrowing down my search. I thought the store was open till 9.

Tomorrow I will have to resume this getting a phone thing. I’ve sort of thrown another problem into the mix, because I found that I could get a refurbished Blackjack II from the website for $60, but first I’d need to register on the site. That would require having an AT&T phone. So, things might become a little more complicated before they get resolved. This seems to be a pretty constant theme though. I’m thinking of adding it to the text at the top of the page “Family, Friends, Life, Problems with Consumerism…”