Hildegarde

I know.  Two posts in a day.

But this one’s just bitching, so feel free to skip it.

It isn’t 9:30 in the morning, and I’m ready to explode, all over yet another round of cell phone chargers.

That’s chargeRs.

To explain:  every single cell phone I’ve ever had has had its charger either just cease to work or else come apart in some way.  

I know it’s the charger and not the battery, because I can use the charger from the same type of phone that somebody else has and I charge up just fine.

And the things don’t get damaged, they just fall apart. 

The latest in this list is the charger on my Samsung Propel, a phone I bought from ATT last November 30/December 1.  That’s less than ten months ago, in case you’re counting.

A couple of days ago, I picked up the charger and the two-part plastic casing that protects the wires next to the part that connects to the phone just came apart into two pieces in my hand.

There was no damage.  The charger hadn’t been hit with anything or trod underfoot or stuck in water.  The two pieces were perfectly pristine.  You could fit them together if you tried.  They just weren’t stuck to each other any more.

The lack of the protective casing is, of course, affecting the operation of the wires it was protecting, which means it is now next to impossible for me to use the charger to charge the phone.

So…I called ATT.  It had been less than a year.  This ought to be covered under warranty, right?

Sorry.

This counts as “physical damage,” even though there was no damage. 

And it doesn’t matter anyhow, because ATT is phasing out the Propel, so they don’t have any parts for it anyway.

I can try one of the ATT stores, but there’s no guarantee they’ll have parts either.

Other than that, I can call Samsung and pay around $45 for a new one.

All of this information was delivered to me in a relentless monotone at great length by some guy in the Warranty department who, I swear, never took a breath, repeated everything he said three or four times, and did me absolutely no good except for wearing down the charge on my phone by two bars over the course of the call.

I usually call my mother’s nursing home twice a day.  Today, I’m going to skip the afternoon call, because I’m afraid that this battery is going to wear down to nothing and they’re not going to be able to get in touch with me if there’s an emergency.

I will also do none of the other calling I do during the day.  I won’t check in with my sons.  I won’t pick up for students. 

If this was the first phone I’d had a problem with the charger with, I would chalk it up to Samsung and never buy that brand again.

But something like this has happened to every single phone I’ve ever had, with the result that I have found myself with a perfectly good phone that has become unusable because I can’t get it charged.

And I know new technology comes and goes very fast, but I’m sorry–ten months?  If I’m forced to get a new phone without being able to charge this one, I’m going to end up losing over a hundred phone numbers, some of which are going to be difficult or impossible to replace. 

And as for ATT–for God’s sake.  I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a worse representative. 

What I do now, I don’t know.

But I did figure out about the Marx and Dante thing–it’s the last line of the preface to the first edition of the Marx. 

But, according to the Dante society, paraphrased.

Bleh.