Ernesto easy, Treofied

Well even though Ernesto was forecast to not be very severe, last night I went around outside in a light rain and picked stuff up.  Yesterday at this time we were assuming the office would be closed today.  Then yesterday afternoon the word was we would open at 1pm, then after work yesterday I got a call that we would be open at 8 like normal.  I was pissed last night as I looked at the forecast and at 8 am the storm was basically going to be on top of us.  I thought it was pretty stupid to force the employees to be on the road at that time of day. 

Well I woke up this morning and the first thing I noticed was we had power, a good thing.  I took Nicki out and there was no rain, but some gusty wind, nothing more than we see with our daily summer thunderstorms.    They closed all the schools so the drive in was pretty empty.  We drove through some steady rain but again nothing bad.  The radar image looks like the major precipitation is right below us so we should be getting dumped on shortly. 

It was funny watching the weather forecasters last night talking about the storm in almost a disappointed manner that it didn’t strengthen into something more news worthy.   Oh well I’m glad it didn’t turn into something worse.

So yesterday I started looking into how I could enlist my brother-in-laws discarded Treo into service as my cell phone.  Originally I had wild ideas about transferring it to Verizon (from Sprint) since they both use CDMA networks.  I read about hacks to make it work although it seemed like a major hassle.  Since the phone is on the Sprint network that already put a shadow of doubt in my mind about my ability to get it online for me.  Well just for the hell of it I decided to call up Sprint and see if it was possible to transfer the phone from my brother-in-law to me.  Well I’ll be damned, it can be done, I just need to get him to start the process.  We were worried about him having to pay an early termination fee on the phone but doing a transfer eliminates that issue. 

So we had a 3 way conversation going with me, my brother-in-law and the Sprint rep on the line.  It took awhile but eventually we got the phone switched to me AND my current cell number transferred to it.  Within an hour the change had taken effect!  I was really amazed.  I mean this was Sprint after all, they had to f it up.  Plus I am getting a really sweet deal on the package, for voice and data access it only comes to 46 bucks a month which is what I paid for straight voice service on my boring Nokia phone. It is about 50 bucks a month less than what we pay for Ali’s Treo on Verizon!  The only downside is I have to pay an early termination fee to Cingular but it isn’t all that much. It almost seems too good to be true. Of course the first thing I did was fire up the web browser and load my blog. 

I have to give credit where credit is due, this may be the first time I ever had a positive customer service experience with Sprint.  I will be tricking the Treo out over the next few weeks. Oh yea it has a camera as well so I will be able to snap pics of things that before I could only describe from memory.