Busy Signal vs. Fax Machine

While home in Utah last Friday, I was supposed to have carpet delivered and installed. My wife and I had picked this date 3 weeks earlier so I could be there to make sure everything went as planned. That morning my wife got a call from the installer that a family emergency had come up and we needed to reschedule. My wife let me know about the delay and I went into action fixing the wrong as we had spent weeks moving out of 3 bedrooms and ripping out the old carpet. I did not want to go another day without something we had already paid for.

I made my first call to the local store where we had purchased the carpet. It is a large chain store with many locations. I did that on purpose so that in the event that one installer had a family emergency, the company would have other installers they could call on to finish the job. The person helping me on the other end of the phone mistakenly hung up on me while trying to transfer me to her manager. Naturally I called back only to get hung up on a second time. That should have been a clue that this person did not know how to use a phone.

My next call went to the customer service department of this large store. I talked with a nice lady who eventually connected me back to the local store that I had called twice before. She routed me to the same employee that had hung up on me. This whole process didn't take long to write but actually took about 30 minutes of real time thanks to all of the automated phone systems and multiple explanations I had to make. Meanwhile the local store had tried several times to call me back but kept getting a busy signal.

With the ubiquity of call waiting and other features that come standard with our mobile phones, we don't realize that old hard-wired phone lines don't include them without extra charges. Some younger people today have never heard a busy signal and doesn't know what it sounds like. The lady at the local store kept saying she couldn't call me back because she kept getting a fax machine and didn't realize that fax machines sound nothing like a busy signal.

I probably made a mistake using an old land line instead of calling in on my mobile phone. However I called from my basement and prefer a land line down there instead of my mobile. I had to laugh about this person not knowing what a busy signal sounds like.

Ultimately I managed to resolve the issue and carpet got installed at 3pm that afternoon.

A New Home for Old Gadgets

If you are like me, you probably have a bunch of old cell phones and used computer equipment lying around the house. I was one of the first people to start carrying a cell phone and when it came time to upgrade, I got a credit for returning my old one. For some reason, the carriers stopped their upgrade programs and so I have a box with all of my old phones. Every once and a while, a Scout troop or school fundraising group will drop by asking for old phones to recycle. While I don't mind helping them out, it would be nice to get some real cash for my old gadgets.

Last night I was getting ready to head off to bed when the news mentioned a story about a company paying for old computers, monitors, cell phones, and other electronic gadgets. I decided it was worth staying up a bit to see if it was something I could use. It was and now I can pass that information on to you.

If you go to www.gazelle.com, you can find out how much your old junk is worth. My son's phone died and is using an old Treo 650 that we had lying around. I did a query to find the value of the phone and discovered it is worthless. I thought back to my last phone that I was using before I got my iPhone 3G and that was a Motorola Razor. I did a search to discover that it is also worthless. Each time I searched for a worthless item, Gazelle offered to recycle the device responsibly. That is nice, but I want cash.

I looked at my iPhone 3G and wondered how much it is worth. I am interested in upgrading to the iPhone 4 and want to know how much I can get for my current phone. I plugged in the numbers and discovered it is worth $104. Now we're talking. At that price, it could be worth it to get rid of my old phone and pick up a new one. This gives me an idea for Christmas . . .