Question: How many Apple & AT&T techs does it take to get voice mail working on your brand-new iPhone?

Answer: Six. Or was that seven? I’ll have to ask my husband whether he spoke to one or two reps the last time he called.

Okay. It isn’t too fascinating a story, so I’ll try to keep it short. Our old cell phones were about four years old and desperately needed replacing. We already had AT&T as our carrier, and we decided to pick up iPhones. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s ragging on them, it’s cool to hate the iPhone. Well, too bad. We like them. I like the features. I like the fact that, historically, Apple’s had a good track record when it comes to producing working hardware. Okay, so there’s a chicken-and-egg problem regarding reception (AT&T didn’t want to roll out lots of G3 towers until they had plenty of customers for them, so the coverage isn’t good yet), but we aren’t far from DC, so we didn’t think that was likely to be a huge problem. I heard rumor of iPhones being fragile, but everyone I talked to who actually had one said they were amazed by how durable the things were.

So. We got ‘em on Saturday.

The good: TOY! Weather reports, maps, driving directions, a good contacts database, etc. I can customize which ringtone matches up with which caller so I know who’s calling. It doubles as an iPod music player. I’m no power-user, but it certainly meets my needs and then some. The battery life so far has been wonderful. Best of all: the reception is AMAZING. My old phone sucked. This one’s fantastic, at least where I live and where my husband works and in the spaces between.

The bad: the voice mail button didn’t work, and anyone who called us got told we hadn’t set up our voice mail boxes yet. My husband had to go through five levels of tech support over the course of more than an hour, repeatedly trying the same things over and over again, until he reached a ‘voice mail specialist’ who sent something to the sim cards on our phones and had the problem fixed in under five minutes. Oh, except I guess the person who force-activated our voice mail boxes didn’t realize we were supposed to have the ‘visual voicemail’ feature, so that’s what the second phone call was about.

On the plus side, by that time they were so worried we’d be unhappy with them that they were going out of their way to make us happy, including not only back-dating the minute plan downgrade we wanted to the beginning of the month, but also rolling over all our extra minutes to the new plan, which usually you can’t do. Just try getting a company like, say, Comcast to stick with you long enough to fix this kind of problem, let alone volunteer to do nice things for you afterward to make up for it. So while it’s really silly that it took that many people to fix our voicemail, it’s great that they kept at it until it was fixed and then tried to make sure we’d be happy customers.

Today’s review is of a kitchen-related gizmo: the Wine & Dine. Yesterday’s isn’t exactly a review, but rather a non-review of Melina Morel’s Prey. And this is the necklace & earrings set I made this morning. Best viewed in full size (click through and click on the image to enlarge it).

I am hopefully taking tomorrow off, so have a great weekend!

How many Apple and AT&T tech support workers does it take to get the voice mail working on your brand new iPhone?

Answer:

That’s not funny. Laugh at something funny.

Tomorrow: the iPhone story.

Today’s review is of Shiloh Walker’s upcoming novel, The Missing. Do yourself a favor and pre-order a copy today!

I’m still beading like crazy. A couple of thoughts:

Etsy appears to be an absolutely fantastic place to sell your wares. The storefronts are highly customizable, and it’s a popular enough place that nearly every crafter I run into on DeviantArt or Craftster seems to use it. Speaking of which, Craftster is a decent place to get some feedback and suggestions regarding your work, and DA is a nice place to get exposure and feedback as well.

When buying in bulk (and even not), Fire Mountain Gems blows me away with their prices, selection, and customer service. I highly recommend ordering from them.

States seriously, seriously need to acknowledge the fact that there are now a lot of small-time home-working crafters who like to sell their wares, and streamline some sort of business process for them. Having ethics is a serious challenge, I swear. If I were willing to cut corners like most online folks, I’d just set up an etsy shop and make a little money. But legally, if I want to sell my wares, I have to collect sales tax from any other Maryland residents I sell to, and that means that legally I need a business license and all that rigamarole. You’d think that for one-person self-run small-time businesses they’d come up with some sort of simple “yes you can collect sales tax without being a business” easy certificate, but no. So, we’re working out how to fold the crafting into the ErrantDreams.com, LLC pre-existing company. Once that’s done I plan to open an Etsy store. It’s driving me a little nuts having to wait, but, that’s life.

In the meantime, you can get a glimpse at the kinds of things I’ll be selling at first by looking at my DeviantArt craft photos.

This new chair design is absolutely awesome. Found at Hey Lady! Whatcha reading?: