ET, phone home

Despite having named me Kimberly, my mother has a host of other names she prefers for everyday emailing purposes.  Variations on the Pumpkin theme (Pumpkinhead, Little Pumpkin, etc.) are her current standbys, though "Earthling" and "Babydoll" have also been known to make an appearance.  It's when she calls me ET, though, that I know she really misses me.  Mostly because it inevitably reads as, "ET, phone home!"

You'd think that phoning in this day and age would be an easy enough concept.  You'd think that because it wasn't currently a bit past midnight and you weren't waiting another half hour so you could skype with your friend who was generously planning to wake up at 8:30 am on a Saturday (good grief, she must be a good friend!) morning.

The timing is a pain. Sydney is either 14 or 15 or 16 hours off U.S. Eastern time, depending on the season and whether or not one side or the other has had time change yet.  And while that doesn't make calling impossible, it certainly makes it intentional.

It's trouble from the get-go really.  Say you want to talk to someone.  Most likely that someone is asleep, though possibly at work.  Say someone wants to talk to me.  Mostly likely I'm at work, though possibly asleep.

If it's important, I just call anyway.  Though, really, I have a hard time justifying waking my parents up to ask questions about preparing spaghetti or which space heater I should buy.  It's relatively rare that high tragedy hits my life at 5 pm (that usually materializes later in the evening), so generally their deepest sleep is undisturbed.  And, oddly enough, they rarely need to reach me desperately at noon.  Though, just for the record, I do always leave my phone on at night, just in case.  And despite being repeatedly awakened by friends who assume I'll be awake and happy to receive texts at 8 am (I'm not), I find it's worth it for the few times crisis really does strike.

But enough on high tragedy.  Let's lower our brows slightly and gripe about those times that just plain don't work.  Take my best friend for example.  I love her dearly, but in the nearly three years I've been in Australia she has yet to grasp that sending me her nightly schedule does utterly no good as I am always at work in her evening time frame.  The gesture, of course is lovely -- naturally I care about what my best friend is doing -- but as it relates to actually finding a time to chat, it accomplishes next to nothing, except sending us into a flurry of facebook messages that eventually eventuate into an actual chat time three weeks after the high tragedy we initially meant to discuss.

Then there's the trouble of being stood up.  It's not fun at the best of times when you're curled up in a cafe sipping a hot chocolate while you wait with a good book, but it can be particularly frustrating when you've rearranged half your day (and generally someone else's) in order to make a skype date only to wait 10 minutes (standard enough for skype dates), 30 minutes (starting to push things), an hour (did I get the time difference wrong by an hour?  did he?), two hours (Guess that's that.  Oh well.  At least I discovered the Old Spice commercials.  Every single one of them.  And every single interview the Old Spice man's appeared in.  And his facebook page.  And his fan club.  And, oh, gosh, look at the time!).

Even once you do connect, you're plagued with problems.  Generally one, if not both, parties are sleepy as all get-out because they're either just waking up or really would have liked to have gone to bed an hour previously, or both.  Such are the sacrifices.  I'll take the night shift any day, though, just for the record.  I tell my friends they can always call 24 hours a day, and I do mean it, but, honestly, I'd much rather they tried at 3 am than 5!  Many things I am; a morning person I am not.

Then, once you're up and skyping (incidentally, when did that stop sounding dirty?  everyone thought it was atrocious when it first came out, but now it's completely blase.  how quickly we forget it sounds like something best done behind closed doors!) there's the trouble of internet connections, dropped calls, frozen images, sound issues, the ever-amusing "okay-you-talk-and-I'll-type-since-for-some-reason-you-can't-hear-me-though-I-can-hear-you" incidents, more dropped calls and garbled speech.  The trade-off being, of course, that you can lovingly pick your computer up and walk it around the house as if it's a cyber-puppy to give your friends a tour of the place.  Oh, look, you'll say:  here is my dirty laundry.  And my unmade bed.  And the floor that really needs to be vacuumed, but thankfully the video quality isn't good enough for you to tell.  Nevermind.  Wouldn't you like to see the kitchen?  Oh, gracious, maybe not, my silly flat mate has left such a mess.  Oops, and in the living room, too, well, why don't you look with me out over the balcony?  Err, evidently it's raining today, you know, let's just go back in my room and keep chatting about the weather there, shall we?  Just try not to look in my closet, I have a wee bit of work to do there before it's really what I'd call presentable.

Thankfully you mostly only videoskype with friends and family who've seen your place in its rougher states anyway, so generally there isn't too much damage done.  It's only when you're skyping with a boy you want vaguely to impress that you have to take the trouble not necessarily to clean the place -- no one's making you walk the computer around after all; the cords are too tangled, of course -- but to deck out in make up and something other than pajamas.  Nevermind that you've already gotten ready for bed and it's 2 am; out comes the eyeliner and down comes the neckline.  Flick the hair and away we go.

Maybe it's not 2 am, though.  Maybe it's 2 pm, by which time you'd really think you'd be dressed, but, you know.  It might be a Saturday, after all.  That's the thing, though.  Weekends end up being by far the best times to phone home, and yet that 2 pm slot is a just a bit frustrating.  Granted the livelier events might be happening after 8, but on beautiful sunny summer days you get feeling a bit cooped up being inside from 2 to 3:30 pm, especially when, seeing as it was Saturday, you certainly hadn't made it out anywhere before then.  Suddenly you realize your whole day has passed inside and, much as you want to be chatting to your long-lost family, you also realize you're going to hit the roof if you don't get out.  Which is hard to explain when you only chat to your family once every other week or so and you're constantly chomping at the bit to say goodbye.

This, though, lends itself nicely to phones instead of skypes.  Phones are much more transportable and are often ideal solutions to the indoor/outdoor dilemma.  I particularly love having one along when I'm waiting for a bus late at night and have 25 odd minutes to kill.  It's too dark to read, I'm too shattered to write, I've answered all my texts, set my alarm for the next day, checked for next texts, double checked that I'd answered all my texts, sat quietly with my hands folded for all of 15 seconds, and am chomping at the bit to do something in the next now, 23 minutes.  Quite often I call Grandma.  It's extremely rare that she and I are awake and able to talk at the same time, but late at night for me is often ideal for her.  There is something to be said for keeping friends in as many time zones as possible.

However, the problem with the phone is the provider.  Not only can I not text my family (they can text me, but I can't text them.  long story.  and boring.  you're really not missing much by not hearing it, trust me.), but I recently switched my phone service from prepaid to a month-to-month contract, which was supposed to be wonderful and cheaper and easier and just that much closer to Heaven on earth as far as mobile phone contracts go, but something went terribly wrong.  Instead of a bill for $35 as the angelic chorus of technicians had assured me I'd receive, I got one for $215.  Granted, that included the internet ($29), as expected, and a partial charge of a preceding month as I'd started in the middle ($17?), but there was still $120 unaccounted for in excess charges.  I'm not normally a big fighter in these matters, but I am all but broke and $120 cannot just go up and missing at the moment.  I called the billing department.

Please hold on for a moment.  Your readership is Very Important to me, and I am delighted you've chosen my blog to read, but at the moment I am too busy serving other Very Important people to pay any attention to you.  Or perhaps writing a different blog post for your future amusement.  Or perhaps checking my email.  Or perhaps checking my facebook.  Or perhaps checking my word count.  But do not despair, your time is Very Important to me and I will be with you as soon as possible.  Would you like to listen to some elevator music while you wait?  I have just the thing.  I'll play it for thirty seconds if you don't mind.  La dee dah dah dah.  La dee dah dah dah.  Please hold for a moment.  Your readership is Very Important to me, and I am delighted you've chosen my blog to read.

You get the idea.  Dear knows how long later I eventually talked to a real man who promised to help me understand why such a tragedy had occurred (the angelic choir had missed a minor detail or two, troublesome darlings that they are) and my international calls had put me a few hundred dollars over the plan I'd actually bought, which was really highly unfortunate.  An hour later, as we were still a bit upset, he very kindly offered to halve the charges, which I found charming in a quaint is-that-all-the-better-you-can-do sort of way.  And so I thanked him tremendously for his time, as I knew he'd done absolutely everything he could to help, and I'd be so glad to let him go if only first he could do one small favor for me and just let me know the address of someone I could send an official letter of complaint to.  And voila!  $120 off my bill in no time flat.

And two hours of prime afternoon time gone.  Alas.

So while that's not entirely cleared up yet, it would seem I still need a new plan, progress is being made.  Which brings me to the last thing I can currently come up with of what can go wrong with international communication:  phones can break.  I could write tirades of pages about how I arrived back in Sydney with my mother in tow, needing to call home to let my father know we were safe, only to find that not only had my phone died, but also that my upgrade to Windows 7 had bamboozled my internet so severely it too refused to connect and we had to spend my mother's entire first morning in Sydney in a certain-store-I-won't-name getting a new phone and then running home to get my passport (goodness knows you can't buy a phone without a passport; what was I thinking?) and computer (far be it from a communications company to fix it remotely) before running it all home again and then finally! getting to see the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, but I will not; I will instead simply leave you with a tirade of a Dickensian paragraph proportions, which I think shall be more than sufficient.

Perhaps next time I'll just write a letter.

Now that's an alien concept.