Flipping from a ‘dumb’ 3G phone to a ‘smart’ 5G one

With 3G mobile phone service about to be either vastly reduced or eliminated altogether in March, depending on where you live, most people like myself who still had “dumb” flip phones had no choice but to finally upgrade their phone.
I did just that in January, and the transition has been a gradual one, though I’m slowly getting accustomed to my new phone. This column describes my, at times, bumpy transition from my old 3G phone to my new 5G one.

This column was published in the February 2022 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, RI:

Over the years, I’ve had to adapt to many new computer systems, and I’ve always taken a practical approach: Expect glitches and take what the people doing the instruction say with skepticism --- especially when their presentation makes even the simplest operations seem a lot more complicated than need be.
One of my first experiences with that phenomenon was while serving as the managing editor of a weekly newspaper in Titusville, Fla., in the late ’70s. I had been using Harris computers at the daily paper affiliated with our publication for a couple of years, and had gotten comfortable with them. (The reporters would type their stories on scanner paper using an IBM typewriter, and they would be sent by courier to the main plant in Cocoa, 18 miles away. The stories were then scanned into the main computer system, and I’d drive down to prepare them for publication.)
After about two years, the company decided to install two computers at our office that would tie into the main system via telephone lines in the days before broadband when dial-up service was the only means to transmit data. Keep in mind that the new computers weren’t laptops or other modern high-speed models, but were, by today’s standards, clunky cathode ray tubes or CRT computers.
I felt confident about my ability to teach my staff how to use the computers until Harris sent a trainer to our satellite office, and the instructor’s explanation of how to use them was so confusing that I wouldn’t have understood her instructions had I not been using the same type of computer for two years.
After she left, I made a management decision: Instead of having the staff follow the computer company’s trainer’s instructions, I worked with our editorial assistant to write an easy-to-understand manual so our reporters could easily use the new equipment. Written in plain language, our homemade effort served our staff well.
My eagerness to embrace new technologies unfortunately didn’t carry over to my cell phones, which I typically would hold on to until having no choice but to switch to a newer model.
For instance, more than 15 years ago, I held on to an older cell phone that couldn’t send texts until being forced to get a flip phone. At that time, my daughters --- both of whom had smart phones --- bombarded me with text messages until I knew how to send them.
I grew to love my flip phone, but I recently had to surrender it because its 3G service will no longer be supported in March as cell phone providers plan to increase their 5G service at the expense of 3G.
The good news is that even though I was first told that none of my data --- texts, photos and contacts --- would be able to be transferred to the new phone, it turned out that my contacts were able to be saved. But that didn’t prevent other obstacles from cropping up.
My wife and I had initially planned to take advantage of an offer from our current Internet and cable provider to sign up for its mobile phone service for the entire family, so we went to one of its retail stores, where we successfully transferred our daughters’ phones to the new provider, but then came three glitches. For some unknown reasons:
1. My wife’s phone couldn’t be transferred to the new service, and she’d have to get a new phone, the opposite of what she had been  initially told.
2. The clerk couldn’t give us our new phones; they’d have to be shipped to our home, meaning we’d have to return to the store to get them programmed.
3. My wife had to download an app to complete the order, which she did, but was then stonewalled as she repeatedly got a message that her identity couldn’t be verified --- despite having been with the company for nearly 30 years and having provided her Social Security number and driver’s license numerous times. And, naturally, whenever she tried to tell the company’s automated-answering system that she needed to speak to an actual person instead of a recording, that never happened.
That was the last straw, so my wife and I kept our current cell phone provider. I received a 5G smart phone, and the transition has been a work in progress, mainly  because I’ve always been a computer-and-mouse person and had never previously used a touch-screen device.
The hope is that I’ll eventually come to appreciate my “smart” phone, but part of me still pines for my simpler “dumb” flip phone, which easily fit into my pants, shirt, vest or jacket pocket and came without a gaggle of apps that I’ll seldom use.
The bottom line for the foreseeable future is that if you’re expecting a text or call back from me, be patient. It’s not easy dragging this fossil into the 2020s.
LARRY KESSLER (larrythek65@gmail.com) is a freelance writer based in North Attleboro. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com

Read the column online: Link to this column the the Jewish Rhode Island website
https://www.jewishrhody.com/stories/please-be-patient-with-me-im-experiencing-technical-difficulties,14113?