Phone troubles

My phone died while I was on vacation last week. By Sunday, the touchpad had seized up; I could no longer dial or access any of its messages, and by Tuesday we'd ordered a new one. (It was an enormous hassle.)

It arrived about this time last Thursday, at which point I promptly went to the store to activate it - and discovered that it couldn't be done, because the pricing plan had been changed during the ordering process, and they couldn't activate the phone until the new pricing plan took effect. Which it would, on August 9, after I'd been conveniently slapped with a bunch of fees for not activating within a 14-day period and suchlike.

On my way back from the store, I discovered that I could call somebody after all, with a lot of work - and so I tried calling my mom to talk this through. I got an answering machine, and left a message - and then, realizing that I couldn't hang up, pulled the battery out.

It was only then that I remembered that I couldn't actually turn the phone on either. My phone was well and truly dead - and Mom had no way to reach me.

It involved phone tag the next morning, and borrowing F.'s phone for allow a long call to the customer representative, to get the whole affair sorted out. (F., for her part, was dealing with a similar problem: to configure a new monitor, she needed a third monitor to do the configuring on. I imagine German has a nice long word for problems whose solutions require themselves to solve.)

By yesterday, the phone had a problem of its own; a certain easy sequence of button presses could forcibly reset it. It was a problem that Samsung was aware of, and in fact had just released the patch for; but downloading and installing it still involved a trip to the store and a wait in line and a visit to the same customer representative I'd seen not a week before.

As of today, my phone is completely workable. But I still have my fingers crossed.