For some time I have been dissatisfied at the state of my smart phone technology, or the lack thereof. Although at times I have been an early adopter of technologies [1], at other times I have been at the lagging end of adoption of technologies. I did not have a cell phone at all, for example, until my senior year of college, when a miscommunication about rides and travel that wasted hours of time led me to decide that the time had come to get a cell phone. As far as smart phones were concerned, it was more the events at Domopalooza, where I was unable to schedule seminars or know where events were located or communicate and share stories in real time with my fellow attendees because my phone was obsolete, along with being informed that my company was willing to pay for upgrades to telephony that connected a person with our e-mail system that pushed me to upgrade. The lure of connection and cash is a powerful one.

For the last several months, my wireless provider (Cricket) has been sending me appeals to upgrade my phone for $75. I would politely look at them, ponder the hassle of dealing with changing my phone, and then ignore them and go about my business. However, the confluence of dissatisfaction with the opportunity to reduce the cost for trading up my phone led me to search for the nearest location of a store for me to get a new phone. In looking at Google Maps, I saw that there was a location shown in the Tanasbourne area near work [2], and so I resolved to go there Monday after work. When I arrived at the location, the store was nowhere to be found, its location taken up by an Indian restaurant. After this failure, I looked for a location of a Cricket store along a route that would pass by Costco [3] and also end up along the route to my usual location for “Taco Tuesdays” in Beaverton. In going to this location, I ended up near the Cedar Hills Mall, where I found I was unable to upgrade to an Apple phone because there was no supply of them. I took the next best option and ended up with an android phone that cost me almost nothing. However, I had to wait quite a while at the store while they tried to update my Cricket account, and while I was there I found out why I had been receiving the notices about my upgrades, and that was because I had a legacy phone/plan from Cricket before it was purchased by AT&T, and AT&T naturally wanted everyone to be on a plan under their bailiwick.

When I went home, I wanted to download some apps, and was told that to do this I needed to go through the Google Play store. Despite tweaking my settings, the phone was simply not able to log into Google despite having the right password and account to connect into, so since it was beyond my level of expertise I called Google’s tech support, and was connected with a fellow for whom telephony was not his specialty. He was, however, very patient and we eventually found a way to get my phone to log into Google. It required me to update information in Google Wallet, a feature of Google I had never used, which revealed that I had had a Google account since 2005, and it was so old that Google was unable to have any information about it on their latest systems. Again, another legacy account that needed to be migrated to newer fields where more data was available to the company. As it happened, we were able to get it to work successfully and after a long call I ended up with $10 in my Google Play account to pay for premium apps; now I just need to find out which apps I consider worth buying.

Of course, when I returned to work I tried to connect my work e-mail to my phone in order to connect to the corporate network and earn my monthly bounty. I was unable to do so, despite knowing my account and password. When I talked to one of the IT people, he mentioned, in a certain tone of voice, that only Samsung phones among the android ones were allowed to port into the system to directly download e-mails, because the rest of android phones did not have sufficient security through encryption to be allowed access. I would be limited to the same access I have on my laptop using the owa to connect via the internet. This is not the first time I had heard of this problem. After all, the Domo app is currently only on iphones (the reason I was looking for an iphone in the first place) because of security concerns with Android phones. So, between security issues in phones and logistical shortages in getting the right phones to stores and customers, it seems like an exercise in futility. So much effort is taken to circle around the same problems of trust and security and logistics in slightly different guises.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/founding-members/

[2] Thttps://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/the-mean-streets-of-tanasbourne/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/check-my-swag/