This was May 2000. Mobile networks, roaming arrangements and phone charges have improved a bit since then! The iPhone was still 6-1/2 years or so away. ~ Ian
So here we are, leaving LA on Day One of our road trip, doing what I’ve always wanted to do — drive a car across the USA. Life’s great, the weather’s beautiful, and so is the scenery — and all we can think about, apart from the fact that we’re hungry, is bloody cell phones.
I’d spent some quality time on the plane learning how to do stuff with the phone that Stephen had got us — like set the time and use it as an alarm clock. Which was good, because for two weeks that was the only thing it was useful for.
Let me say, if you’re thinking of roaming with your New Zealand phone in the States, that almost NOTHING happens the way Telecom says. A fairly basic problem for us was that Telecom hadn’t told the US we were coming. We hardly expected a front-page story in the LA Times, but a word in the cell-phone company’s ear would have been a nice gesture.
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Heather (spoil-sport) insists I keep this story short, so — two weeks after we arrived Stephen’s phone started working!
One of the first calls was from an excitable guy who wanted to know just WHO I WAS and WHY WAS I ANSWERING HIS TELEPHONE NUMBER? I referred him to the completely useless Telecom help line and wished him luck.
You might think — might wish — that that’s the end of the story, but we needed a cell-phone. So in the meantime we’d gone to Radio Shack before we left LA and set up a pre-paid one. We’d explained carefully that we wanted to roam nation-wide blah blah. No problem, the manageress said.
She gave us a clunky grey phone that Noah’s Dove might have used to keep in touch with the Ark while out looking for dry land. Nobody with a beautiful, blueberry-coloured clam-shell laptop like ours could possibly be seen dead with it, but we figured — provided we left it in the car — that no-one would be the wiser. And anyway it came free with the pre-paid minutes.
Well…
Heather spent most of the way from LA to Death Valley looking at the manual instead of the scenery, but THAT PHONE DIDN’T WORK EITHER.
In a right state, I can tell you, we went to Radio Shack in Carson City for a refund, but the nice guy there wouldn’t play ball.
What he did find out, though, was the reason that the phone didn’t work. The US$100 of time we’d bought hadn’t been activated, and — once he’d done that — all we had to do to get our money’s worth was drive around the United States looking for phone companies that would honour our pre-paid minutes! Needless to say there were none in Carson City.
I promise not to bore you with this any more, except to say that we used up all those prepaid minutes waiting on hold, placing fruitless calls to places where we weren’t able to eat or stay, and dialling wrong numbers.