What a week!

I am excited to bring last week to an end.  It started on Monday with a crisis.  A young 22 year old shot himself on the playing field of a local junior high (he died).  He has two siblings still in school one of whom attends said JHS.  While there doing crisis response on Monday morning, a woman brought a tiny young man into the school claiming she was the young 8th grader's aunt and that his mother died on Sunday and left him at school.  He also has a sibling in a nearby elementary school.  And the death was a result of a drug overdose – likely the student's Ritalin and other narcotics she had convinced doctors to prescribe her.  So a crisis day it was!

Then, that same day I was in a meeting and one of the directors in attendance took my phone, claiming something was wrong with it.  I told her it worked fine but she insisted on playing with it and eventually disconnected the LCD screen from the circuit board in the phone.  I could hear my phone working but could see nothing.  This director then said “get 'so and so' to order you a new phone.”  I replied, “this is my personal phone not a district phone.”  “Oh, sorry,” she said, "you will need to get a new phone." 

 

After the meeting, I took my broken phone to a T-Mobile store on 3300 and State.  I felt like I was in a quick change – bait and switch – charge this woman a lot of money place.  The sales people helped me file an insurance claim, set up a loaner phone ($50), and told me to come back with the new phone and they would transfer data from phone to phone. The new phone was delayed (supposed to be overnighted) due to snow storms back east.  I finally got it on Wednesday afternoon.  So I took everything old and new to the T-Mobile place on 5600 West.  (I was out on the west side doing school visits.) The sales person there kindly explained that the store on State Street is an “express” store and not an official corporate T-Mobile (even though there were no indicators as such and the sales people had on the same black and pink shirts) and that they likely did lead me astray.  This person was able to set up my new phone using the SIM card from my trusty little green “dumb” phone and told me “sorry” that I would need to take the iPhone someplace else to have the data transferred because the data transfer is dependent upon a working screen.  Arggggg!!  Well this young salesman, Jakie, sensed my frustration and told me about a place in T-ville where I could possibly get some help.  So, I bundled up all of my stuff and headed to the T-ville hood – 1875 W 4700 S.  There in the deep dark corner of a strip mall was Action Wireless Repair Shop.  Owner/fixer, Charlie, was most helpful and very nice.  Come to find out, he could have fixed my broken phone for $100 bucks by just putting on a new LCD screen.  (The deductible for the replacement was $150.)  We talked over possible solutions and decided he would fix the broken phone temporarily with a used screen, transfer the data from old to new, kill the old phone (because I have to send it to the insurance company) and $45 dollars later I would be good to go.  So, around 5:00 p.m. Wednesday I was finally reconnected to the wireless communication world.  Altogether, it cost me a little over $250 and a lot of anxiety.

 

Add to all of this - my basic day to day confusion, my diminishing memory, full-time work, a missionary son 6,000 miles away from home, concern for all of you and Grandpa and I get to the end of a week exhausted.  Exhaustion is not all bad – it represents that my life is busy and full and amazing and I love that.  However, I could have done without the broken phone wild goose chase.

 

Thanks for reading.