Telephony


by Jonah

On Tuesday last week, my brother Ben was driving by the mall and got a hankering for Chick-fil-a. So he parked and went in, only to realize that Chick-fil-a was on the other side of the mall. But the Verizon store was right there, so he went in to see about getting some equipment for his phone. Which they didn’t have, but the salesman talked Ben into taking home two new phones.

What does a boy do with two new mobile phones? He gives one of them to his mother…who, mind you, already has a perfectly good phone of her own. Mom called us on her new phone that evening…before nine because it’s Verizon and it’s free. Mom had been thinking about switching to Verizon anyway. They have the best service, and she can talk to us unlimitedly. “Plus,” she added, “we could add you to our plan if you ever need to.” So she decided to use it for the two week risk-free trial. She put Dad on the phone with me, who said something about Ben getting suckered. What does a boy do with two new mobile phones?

The next evening, we discovered our phone service was cancelled.

Berck sent an e-mail to Mom and Ben. Mom overnighted one of the phones to us that morning. You can’t get service much faster than that.

Since Verizon doesn’t have any stores in Oklahoma, Berck mailed his phone to Ben, who is going to get it switched over to his account. And we’ll have 251 area codes, so anyone in Mobile can call us for free.

But only on weekends and nights after nine, of course.

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50 Cent


by Jonah

I had my six month evaluation at work today. I had a 3 (exceptional) in everything except Knowledge (2) and Attendance (4). It was a very positive evaluation. This apparently was good enough to give me a 50 cent raise. (In another three and a half years, maybe I’ll actually be able to meet our expenses!) It affects my paycheck on Monday, which is great since we worked a good six hours of overtime this week. We came in early (six a.m.) three days.

That included Tuesday so we could be sure to leave at four p.m. so everyone would have time to vote. I offered to print out a voter registration form for Berck, but he has said that he isn’t going to vote until he can do it from home. Our polling place happens to be the “clubhouse” attached to our apartment complex’s office. That’s about as close to voting from home as you can do in Oklahoma. But Berck changed his stance to only voting when there’s someone worth voting for.

Oklahoma apparently doesn’t have voting booths with little privacy curtains or individual voting machines. You have to use the marker they give you to complete the arrows next to the candidates you want. Then you feed your ballot into a voting machine that whirs and pulls your sheet into itself. I didn’t know which way to insert mine, so it probably went in upside down and was invalidated. The person who was supposedly manning it stepped up to take my marker after I had already watched my ballot gobbled up.

Berck and I stayed up pretty late, listening to NPR’s coverage and constantly hitting refresh on CNN’s website. The one thing we shared in this election was the excitement of watching the results come in on such a tight, tight race. Berck did some calculations and scribbled on a pad of paper until he came to the conclusion that it was all coming down to Ohio…before anyone else on the air did. And he was right.

I had learned my lesson four years ago about waiting up all night for the results, and I was glad I did when I got up in the morning and saw that it was still up in the air. I didn’t find out who had won until I was driving home from work that night.

I couldn’t celebrate with Berck, Mom and Dad are in Highlands this week, and the chalet doesn’t have very good cell phone service, so the only person I could call before nine was my brother, who also has Verizon. So I called Ben and said, “You’re the only person I can talk to!”

“Why?” he asked, “Where’s Berck?”

“You’re the only person I can share the exciting news with.”

“Why? What happened? Tell me!”

“The election!”

“Oh, yeah.”

Of course, he’d stayed up till two, when Fox called Ohio for Bush, so it was pretty old news by then. But it was new for me.

Okay, I think I’ll post the story about how we got our new telephone in another post.

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A Sad Day for Freedom


by Berck

It’s been a cold, dreary, drizzly day. It’s been a long time since I remember a day feeling like this one. The last one I remember was just after final exams in December of ’98, in Dallas.

I flew on Saturday, to Duncan. I had a rough time navigating, but I managed to stay on course on the way there and back. I got a compliment on my landing back in Norman.

And now it’s Wednesday, and it’s been cloudy and raining ever since Sunday morning. Looks to be better tomorrow, but of course I can’t find anyone to schedule me for a plane. My instructor is supposedly handing me off to someone else because he’s switching over to teaching instruments. But I’ve heard from neither him nor anyone else. I went by the school today, but no one there knew anything. The phone number I had for my instructor doesn’t seem to be working, I might have copied it into the new phone wrong.

Joanna was acting like a kid at Christmas yesterday. I’m not quite sure how anyone can get so excited over an election. I told her at 10:30 that all that mattered was Ohio, and it looked like Kerry had quite lost. She didn’t give up for another half hour. She called everyone, even my mother, who had fallen asleep at the television. She eventually came to bed, but told me excitedly in the morning, that I was, in fact, right. Mom didn’t believe me either. Oh well.

I passed a pickup truck today with nothing but “911” written in shoe polish on the rear window. I wanted to stop and ask, “What does that mean?”

I just hope that I have some civil rights left by the time it’s over with.

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Benadryl


by Jonah

Norman is celebrating Halloween tonight instead of tomorrow so that people can go to church. I suspect there will be trick-or-treating tomorrow night as well.

So we unscrewed our porch light and went out to eat.

Then we stopped by the airport and sat out on flight school’s deck and watched planes in the pattern land.

While we were sitting there, something bit my hand. The heel of my hand swelled up in what looked like two bites.

We drove over to Rusty’s Custard Stand, and my arm started itching. Then my thumb started itching. Now the swelling has gone down in the heel of my hand, but the end of my thumb is completely swollen.

It’s like something is traveling around under my skin. Like an X-Files episode.

This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happend to my body. Other than my period starting.

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Weather and Telephones


by Berck

So, Dad decided to cancel his telephone service. And ours along with it, without warning.

It sort of gives Joanna a clean slate when it comes to resumes, since we know no one will be calling her about anything she’s sent out already!

It looks like the call she got just before we lost telephone service is for a possible insurance sales job. I’m not too excited about the prospects of a commission-only sales job, but she thinks it might work. I suppose it won’t matter until we find out if they call her back or not. Which, fortunately, they can do, because we have a new telephone number now. If you call me, I’ll tell you what it is.

I still haven’t flown since I went to Stillwater on Saturday. Between telephones and weather, it just didn’t happen. The weather cleared up a bit this afternoon, but the winds were quite high. I would have had to land with a crosswind exceeding that of the “maximum demonstrated crosswind velocity” of my airplane. Since I’ve only done that a couple of times, and it’s against my school’s policy for me to do so, I elected not to go. Furthermore, it looked like there was a possibility of thunderstorms popping up in the vicinity. And, I haven’t landed with stiff winds, much less a crosswind, in a very long time. Judging from some of the landings I saw out there today, I decided to wait for better weather.

I should be able to fly tomorrow. I’m on the schedule twice on Sunday, but it’s probably going to start storming again.

This rating is going to take me forever, I think. I’d hoped to be done before the winter solstice, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

I just can’t see Joanna as an insurance salesman. Can you?

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