New phone, who dis?

Did I mention I accidentally bought a new phone the other week?

I know. The picture has nothing to do with the post title. Have you ever tried to take a picture of your new phone, with your new phone?

I was going into Gainesville to have lunch with Jenn and run a couple in-town errands, and so I planned to swing by the Verizon store and talk to them about JetPacks. If our plan is to cord-cut, and get rid of DirecTV, and switch to streaming, we need to use our Verizon plan for that because even though it’s a shitty connection, it’s a shitty connection with no data cap. Unlike our HughesNet “house” internet, which is marginally less shitty but has a data cap.

While testing this streaming thing out, we’ve been using my phone as a hot spot (Tim’s phone is so old that it’s about one generation away from a flip-phone, and can’t do hotspots. Or reach the Internet any more at all. Or run Instagram. But I digress.). This is working about as well as you’d expect for a phone that gets two bars inside, tops, but… it’s better than nothing, and it’s less expensive than DirecTV, so…. [ shrugs ]

So I stopped by Verizon, but everyone was with someone else, and while I only had a quick question I also only had a few minutes. So I left and went and had a great lunch with Miss Jenn, and decided to hit Verizon again on my way home.

Pretend there’s a picture of our lunch here, and that I’m not getting a JSON error when I try to upload photos. Because what I really have patience for first thing in the morning is a tech problem.

ANYWAY.

So after lunch I went back to Verizon, and talked to them about a Jetpack. Of course they tried to get me to change my phone plan from unlimited data to one of their new “unlimited” plans that has a data cap (does “unlimited” mean different things in different places?) and I was like, nope. Keeping my plan, thanks. They had just sold the last one, but another would be in by Saturday, so could I come back? Ugh. Sure.

Fast forward a fdw days and now for $20/month we have a little Jetpack plugged into an outlet in the living room that can connect up to 15 devices and gives us weak but unlimited Internet access. We’ve hooked up the Fire Stick to it, and I also put my tablet on it, and the range juuuuuust reaches to my treadmill in the other room, so now I can straight up watch things on Netflix or Prime on my tablet when I walk instead of having to try to remember to download what I want to watch while walking, before 8 AM when our HughesNet switches over.

But going back in time! A day or two before my going into Verizon, That Poor Man had also mentioned maybe it was time for him to get a new phone. He’d be much happier if I put all that together for him (coding databases, he’s your dude – but tech? Leave it to me. I did a lot of thinking over about 24 hours and decided that I wanted to get him what I have, a Note 8. I love that phone, and yes, the 10s are about to come out (or just came out) but they don’t have a headphone jack and that’s a dealbreaker for me. My new credit card scanner uses bluetooth, but I have a backup one that plugs into the headphone jack of my phone if the bluetooth one is giving me any problems or won’t scan. Yes, I know there’s a dongle thing you can buy, but when handing my phone to people to sign for credit cards, I want to keep the handful of tech as easy as possible.

So while I was there ordering the MiFi Jetback dooby, I asked if they had any Note 8s left. I was hoping for one on sale, since the 10s were fresh. But, no. They’d returned all the 8s, and were getting ready to return all the 9s. Did I want a 10? Nope, sure don’t. I’m sure it’s a great phone but no headphone jack, like I said, is a deal-breaker. He kept trying to sell me on an LG phone and I was like, been there, done that, paid my dues. If I hated it but still used it for a year, Tim would throw it across the room by the end of the week. Hey, but wait, though, did they say they had any 9s left? Does it have a headphone jack?

Which is how I wound up buying a new Note 9 for myself, and wiping my Note 8 to give to Tim.

Now we both have new phones and are quite happy. I mean, I’m happy. I guess he’s happy? I asked after a day or two how the new phone was working out and he was just like, “eh, OK.”

And we’ve been watching Veronica Mars on Hulu, two or three episodes every two or three days, a series I’d never seen before, but he has seen the first two seasons of. And we’re working on clearing off the DVR in anticipation of cancelling DirecTV before the end of our next billing cycle.