Foreign

 

Settled at our hotel in Paris.  Difficult transfer from airport.  Basically sleep deprived from flight, which in America we would call a red eye.  Not fully adapted to the six hour time difference.  And coffee deprived with an absence of more than 48 hours.  Cannot get SIM card to work in cell phone.  T-Mobile contact told me they fixed it but didn't.  At least I learned how to change a SIM card in my current phone.  One more T-Mobile demerit.  Consider a different carrier after the Holy Days which start shortly after I return home.

Paris, and I presume the rest of France, definitely differs from what I have become not only used to but dependent upon.  Not being able to have portable access to FB in my pocket is definitely a hardship.  Had a mishap with my new camera, not permanent damage.  Hotel room a bit cramped, though probably larger than a cruise ship would have offered.  Even the dogs that people walk on the sidewalks appear UnAmerican.  But no panhandlers or homeless people bedded in storefronts thus far.  That's probably UnAmerican too.

Mostly adapted.  Pâtisseries where we had lunch last night and breakfast today were top-notch experiences.  Walked the perimeter of my hotel.  Charm in one direction, in the other a small enclosed park area with an iron fence.  Architecture probably from some era just before Art Deco.  Or maybe since Art Deco originated in Paris, what we have here is the precursor to Miami's South Beach buildings or NYC's Chrysler Building.  I saw a few penthouses, but mostly fronts with carved design.  Streets are rather wide for a city.  From the air and from the highway that connected the airport to town, the buildings had more of a Soviet look.  Tall rectangular structures, plain boxes of about 10 stories, mostly white or other neutral shade placed in clusters.  No external architectural features. Probably where most of the people can afford to live, or maybe why there appear a dearth of homeless people.

Not a lot of traffic on a Sunday morning.  For all the great Cathedrals people come to Paris to see, I did not encounter anyone walking to a local church for worship, let alone a church itself. I would have expected more of the small businesses to be closed this Sunday. One lantzman, a young fellow with a white kippah, who did not seem too concerned about being attacked.

Our hotel seems to survive with tourist contracts, a mixture of tour groups and a fair number of airline staff assigned to this hotel fort their rest period.  Various tours have signs or tables.  People in corridors or elevators with airline uniforms.  Hotel seems American.

Faulty Phone

I've had my device less than a year.  It replaced a phone damaged by an errant wave at the beach which served me mostly trouble free for four years, which replaced another damaged by water.  This one seemed as close as I could get to a 1:1 exchange.  It had a C-port so I purchased a new charger and cord, then to Five Below for some more cords and a suitable car adapter.  

This week the ability to recharge it started to fail.  With my charger and cord, obtained at the time of phone purchase, it would sometimes turn on, sometimes not, sometimes charge, sometimes stop charging after the initial screen indicated the charger had been recognized.  My wife's charger refreshed my phone reliably.  I therefore assumed the fault lied in the wall charger or cord, so I bought a new charger and brought in my cord from the car.  No recognition of the phone with that charger either.  In my car, the USB-C cord connected to the car's USB port or into a USB adapter seemed to work, the C-C cord inserted to the car adapter's C-port gave the same result as the c-c cords in my house to the wall adapters.  I put my wife's phone, which also has a C-port into both of my C-port chargers, and with each of my c-c cords.  Her phone charged instantly. Must be my phone. Or maybe not yet.  

Solutions to most anything can be found with a web search.  First, my situation had been recognized by others, many others, including places offering to fix that problem for a fee, one an easy drive from home.  And also a few algorithms, not successful, at least the easy ones weren't.  Took the Samsung to its place of purchase.  T-Mobile store no help, in fact, I'd call them anti-help.  They sell phones and saw an opportunity to sell another.  Told me I had no warranty even though the device was less than a year old and it came with a warranty.

Samsung has a site.  Accessing it not easy, Not yet succeeded.

Since my phone charged on a USB-C cord in my car and on my wife's charger, I took the cord inside from the car, plugged it into a wall device with a USB port and five minutes later it is still charging.

Teachers and professors over the years put a lot of effort into teaching their students how to approach an unknown, this time my phone not accepting a charge in one situation but functioning in another, in a methodical way that explores each possibility.  I'm out of possibilities.  But I'm still ahead of the agent at T-Mobile who had no interest in figuring out which part could be remedied, defaulting to her interest of selling a new phone that the customer may not really need.

Getting a New Cell Phone

My devices fail suddenly.  Boost phone got wet.  The phone that replaced it failed to take a charge.  I had to replace it on short notice a week before my Adriatic cruise.  The phone that replaced it, my current Samsung Galaxy J7 Star, had no serious issues in its not quite four years of faithful service.  Yet it took an unanticipated wave from the sea, never quite working right in the four days that followed.  Initially it had an overheated message, then auto shutoff.  I went to the T-Mobile store to see about repairs or replacement, writing down the model numbers of their affordable inventory.  I selected one, but by the following day, the phone worked fairly well, though the speaker never recovered.  I could get sound with headphone but not with the telephone or You Tubes.  Damaged beyond repair.  I had one false alarm previously, dropping it on the concrete front walk resulting in a glass crack.  Followed online repair, small enough to stabilize with some superglue.  No loss of function that time.  Followed the self-helps on the WWW, no luck.  Time for a new phone.

This sort of brings me to a branch point.  The path of least resistance would be to go to the T-Mobile store and get one of theirs.  Not that T-Mobile endeared themselves to me.  Never liked going to the store, reminds me too much of my synagogue where very little thinking goes on and the staff really don't register anything you try to tell them.  T-Mobile telephone agents have been a better experience but I often didn't get what I wanted.  If the price of other carriers is comparable, I'm open to a different company.  Could go to Staples, maybe should. I did.  They abandoned their in store cell phone business. Probably shouldn't go to Best Buy, but could at least take a look.  Sufficiently deterred by my last two times there not to give it third round.  I'm not desperate for a replacement and can still get sound with earbud use.  Check the options.  Decide by day's end.

In the meantime, I went to Target which had options that I mostly didn't understand.  So I called my friend in NYC who does understand.  Advice:  stay simple.  Just go back to T-Mobile, get one of their phones and pay them to set it up.  So that's what I did.  Chose the one I preferred from the list I made a few days earlier.  Setting it up not straightforward.  I wanted this straightforward.  To do that I needed to select another Samsung Phone.  They had one in my budget, so now we're ready to go.  The agent plugged stuff in.  I added a new charger and a screen protector, as cracked screen from dropping is the most likely source of premature demise not covered by warranty.  Agent said all done.  Since it has C-cords, I went to Five Below down the road apiece, purchasing one cord with a C-insert at each end and another with a C-port for the phone and a USB port for my car's outlet to use it when driving.  

As soon as I got in my car, I realized that the Toyota App did not transfer.  Neither did any of my other apps.  I reinstalled Toyota, paired my new phone, confirmed that I could connect to the car's navigation system.  Then home, more than a little irritated as I settled on the Samsung brand because it could make the new phone identical to my old one.  My wife being a much nicer person than me, most notably when I am irate, we both headed back to the T-Mobile store.  Yes, the apps should have transferred but that requires a minimum level of charge on the old device, which it didn't have.  So I charged it in the store, he then transferred the apps and confirmed that the transfer would complete in an hour or so even when no longer plugged in.  

I returned home with all my stuff in the pink paper shopping bag with the T-Mobile logo.  Left it on a kitchen chair overnight.  The apps all transferred, though they appear on the new screen in a different order than the old one.  But I think I'm ready to do things that I did with the previous device.  I can check email, access the internet, take pictures, make a YouTube additions to my dr. plotzker's mind series, read library books from Hoopla, and ignore text messages.  A bit more of an ordeal than I would have liked.  Takes some time getting used to the new format.  Generally my phones last four years or so, almost regarded as semi-disposables, but I anticipated nearly full restoration of previous utility soon.