So I have had my LG enV cell phone for over two years. It's the original VX9900. It looks like a coffin -- a "bar" phone with a flip up keyboard. It was the best compromise I could pull out of my then girlfriend (not quite fiance or wife yet) because she wanted to transfer my service to her plan and we were "merging" bills in order to eventually marry, which we did. It was a good plan.

I back this phone up (read-only) to my PC about once every three months or so. The last time I did so, I swapped the original gray/silver plastics to that really dorky burnt orange color that people think look good on PT Cruisers and Scions for some reason. I just felt it made it stand out, that's all. Just $35 later and it felt like I had a new phone. Granted at first my ear-piece didn't work, so I had to run out and get a bluetooth bug for my ear. Once the ear-piece started working properly a few days later, that damn thing hit the back of some drawer in the house never to be seen by human eyes again. I hate those damn things!

This phone has a few annoyances, though. These quirks are somewhat minimal. For instance, you can't save your contacts to your SD card. I have a 4GB micro-SD that holds my whole MP3 library, some emergency apps (like an ISO of Hiren's Boot CD, which comes in very handy in a pinch) and many, many pictures. I try to save pictures to my phone as often as possible, because I like to share them and my cell phone's 2 megapixel camera takes better pictures than most of the cameras I have laying around.

Another quirk is that I can only receive about 40-50 text messages (especially with attachments, because my wife has the LG enV Voyager that takes really sweet pictures) before the phone gets pissy and wants me to dump everything before I can receive any more texts. I hate Twitter. I think those who use Twitter and Twits, not Tweets, because otherwise it would be Tweeter, not Twitter. I prefer SMS texting over Twitter anyway, because I can filter them at the base (i.e. One company I service uses SMS texting to their base PC for the use of remote time-clock services) which can come in handy when somebody Twitzes you off.

The worst quirk, which finally led me to seek a firmware upgrade after two years, was the fact that the calendar event alarms will alert you one day before, two hours before, one hour before, fifteen, ten and five minutes before or on time. Hey? What the hell ever happened to 30 minutes? It takes me 30 minutes to usually wrap it up with a talkative client. It takes me about 30 minutes to drive from one side of the metro to the next. It takes me about 30 minutes to regain my composure and take a deep breath before I have to go see any annoying client and by God it takes me 30 minutes to take a good groaning shit or drink an ice cold beer... So where the fuck is the "30 minutes before" setting???

So I went into the cell phone company store last night. I was told that this store had an on-site technician handy... Well... They didn't... But I was told that they could do phone firmware upgrades. When I asked the blonde "floor manager" if I would lose anything I was assured that I would not. She lied. Thirty minutes later, after having dinner with my wife, I returned to a blonde with a look of sheer terror on her face. Now I'm not an idiot. I do shit like this for a living. I should have known better than to walk in without my phone backed up. I should have known not to leave it in the hands of a "floor manager" who looked like her greatest talent was walking around with an orange translucent clipboard stuck to her right breast. I should have known that even in the best of situations, a phone firmware upgrade can fail, leaving me with a dead, useless phone. I'll admit that much. The nit-wit in question, though, should have been kind enough to warn me, so that I could have backed up my phone prior to her lobotomization of it, though, too.

Twenty minutes after I had arrived to pick up what should have been my gleaming happy LG enV, I was told that something within the phone was corrupted and that not only had I lost all my contacts, my whole calendar, half of my damn renovation pictures, my fucking custom ringtones and every other damn thing short of my micro-SD card (and I still have to verify that it is totally 100% intact today), but my brand-new paper weight was stuck in "roam" and wouldn't accept the PRL. She tried to blame it on the foreign area code I use for my business to the fact that I had swapped the plastics myself, and everything pretty much came to a head when she said, "Well, you could always upgrade your phone."

At that point I believe I called her everything short of a white woman, with her supervisor (another blonde, creating a wind tunnel) standing right beside her, which by my posture summoned my wife from the car, who once she heard the situation chimed in right behind me, which caused a great disturbance in the force. The verdict became that this cell phone store was going to overnight me a new (firmware upgraded, no corruption, orange plastics included) phone, which will arrive on Saturday by noon.

In the meantime, I get to walk around with no idea where I am suppose to be, no contacts at all (I had just picked up six new customers) and a sense of butt-fucked bewilderment like waking up the next morning in an alley after a night of watching Brokeback Mountain, naked, in a dimly lit gay bar, with my wrists shackled to my ankles, and the scent of french vanilla, papaya and lilacs emanating from my savory corn hole and at some point just blacking out.

If somebody calls, I can't identify them as friend or foe. If somebody calls up and bullshits their way into "you were suppose to be here today" I have no recourse. If I forget a client, well, I could simply lose them. I might as well be playing Russian roulette with my business...

And all of this just in time for Halloween!

Be afraid... Be very afraid... Moo-ha-ha-ha!!!