The iPhone that was and the tire that wasn’t

I got an iphone. A branspakin new iphone. I am delighted. It’s awesome! For work I needed one. Work pays for my entire plan – all I had to buy was the actual phone. I am completely in love. And it really has helped my productivity at work.


For example – this morning I needed to wake up and order bagels for an all day meeting we have today. Normally – this would consist of me opening my computer, waiting for it to turn on, looking up the specifics for the meetings, looking up the nearest Einstein bagels number to the meeting, putting the number in my phone and calling. Today – I woke up, grabbed my phone – looked up the meeting and number, and it automatically called it from the website. Now I realize this is old news to most people. And I know the capabilities of phones that actually work – but this is exciting for me! I can check my work email so quickly now, wherever I am. Work during meetings at an offsite location, where I have no internet… Also this weekend, we all played Words With Friends on our iphones. It was a blast. LOVE my iphone! And love that I don’t have to pay anything to have it!!


So I’m driving down the freeway on the way to work on Friday morning. Listening to Pandora on my iphone because I CAN! Normally I carpool and would not be driving, but I was leaving straight after work to go to some friends’ house for the weekend. I’m in the left lane, and suddenly I lose control of my car. It starts going back and forth and swaying and I know I’ve completely lost a tire. A tire going flat/ shredding is one of my greatest fears, as I’ve heard horror stories about them. Fortunately, I had heard the stories, so I knew what had happened – knew the signs and could stop quickly. Unfortunately, I was in the far left lane and there was no way I could get over to the right side. There was space to pull over, but I still was out in the road a little bit. I hadn’t ever been in that position before, so I had no idea what to do. Do I pull over to the left? Is that legal? There is a lane so it must be… can I make it to the right? I know you are not supposed to drive on a flat tire and my car was completely gone at that point… so I pulled over as much as I could. Cars are going around me, and my car is shaking from the speed. I am a little freaked out.


Who do I call? I’m pretty sure I let my AAA expire. I think I have roadside assistance with Toyota. I’m partly in the road – how are they going to tow me? Do I call the police? I’m still partly in the road… do I call my Dad? I decided against calling Dad - I thought he’d really question my sanity in calling him clear across the world to ask him these questions. Daren had just gotten to town Thursday night and knows everything and is one of my best friends, and is actually close enough to help if I need it, so I called him. About 4 times. He didn’t answer – and who does answer their phone at 7:30am when they don’t have to work? (He actually called me back a couple minutes later, all groggy and concerned. What a good friend!).


Next step – I called Toyota. As I thought, I do have road side assistance. They transferred me over to someone who could help, and almost as soon as he got on the phone with me, there was someone by my window. A cop! He told me they were stopping traffic so I could get across the road. Great! I look behind me, and there is an incident management vehicle in the middle of the road, completely halting all traffic. I limped across the road to the right side and pulled off. The cop told me he and the incident management guy could change the tire, no problem. So I hung off with Toyota who was going to send a tow truck (I was so flustered, it didn’t even occur to me it was my TIRE. I have a spare and think I know how to change the tire. I could change it myself. I could ask someone who lives close to help me. Absolutely no need for a tow truck. But clearly I was not thinking clearly. The cop and the incident management guy were great. They changed the tire and had me on my way in no time.


But, it still remains, that I completely stopped all Northbound traffic for about 5 minutes on Friday morning. I was that awful person who makes everyone late. I am more than a little embarrassed.


The funny thing, is while I was sitting there nearly being obliterated by traffic, I saw the incident management guy go by going south, with his sirens on. And I thought, “Well Brittney – it could be worse. You could need that guy.” And he was coming for me. Hahahaa…


I took Tim into Toyota later that day. They said there was a hole in my tire almost the size of my fist. He had no idea what would cause a hole like that. Said it was punctured from the inside out. Whatever caused the hole must have worked its way out at freeway speeds. So I had to pay $200 for a new spare tire. In the whole 5ish years I had my Olds, I never needed my spare. I guess I was really lucky.


So now, if that ever happens again, I know what to do. Having my tire go out on the freeway is now no longer a big fear – I’ve experienced it. It was absolutely no fun – and turned into a whole drama since I was on the left hand side, but it all worked out.


Lessons I learned – never drive fast on the freeway, never drive in the left side lane, and check your tires every day. Yup – that’ll all happen.

Saxophone #2

Now that I sit in the middle of the hallway, there is always tons of commotion. I do well in commotion – I can concentrate and multi-task with the best of them (I am the oldest of 5 kids...). I am super good at voice recognition – a rare and almost useless talent – but I can’t for the life of me tell when MY phone is ringing, versus when one of the hundred people sitting within a hundred feet of me’s phone is ringing. This could have something to do with the fact that everyone has the exact same electronic ring tone. My good voice recognition fails me there.

There are so many times I’ll be down the hallway, and hear what sounds like, to me, to be my phone ringing – only to run down the hallway to get to my phone, to see the guy behind me coyly pick up his phone. Or I’ll cut a conversation short to dodge back to my desk, only to see Julie grab her phone. Sigh. I can never win.

If I miss my phone, I get a voicemail. I have this unusual and illogical loathing of voicemails. It means I have to handle an issue later versus taking care of it now. It means I’ll have to call the guy back. It means I’ll have to turn off my music, put my earphones in, turn up the volume on my computer, wait until WindowsMedia finally decides to load, listen to the voicemail, close a million boxes down (YES I really want to close Windows Media down. YES I really want to close the voicemail prompter. NO I don’t want to change the format. YES I want to close the email that alerts me I have a voicemail), turn back down the volume on my computer, and press play on my music. And finally, delete the voicemail – because they take up a lot of space, and you only get so much space in your inbox. Believe me, I know. I’ve had to get a bigger inbox. Twice.

Can you see the nuisance and workload-increaser voice mails are?

So – today after a couple dozen ridiculous phone encounters - I decided I couldn’t get any work done until I had a new ring tone. This was now a productivity issue.

(Have you ever seen the episode of The Office where Jim won’t work until Karen gets the bag of chips she requires? This was like that.)

I finally figured out, using numbers, how to get to my ringtones. I then began to listen to each of them. Julie came to listen and give her inputs as to which one she would allow me to have I should get.

I personally wanted the ring tone Are You There? Which offers a lovely male tenor saying, (wait for it…) Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Julie said if I chose that one, she would throw something at me every time my phone rang. That encouraged me much more than dissuaded me, I’m afraid.

However, in the end – I went with Saxophone #2. It is a nice little ditty – and has an unexpected end. Which is why I like it. It goes all low and mysterious at the end.

Also – if the song, “There’s a place in France where the naked ladies silly people dance, there’s a hole in the wall where the men monkeys can see it all” had a theme song – Saxophone #2 would be it (The silly people/monkeys is the version I taught my siblings. I wonder if they even know the real version…?).

People walked by during this whole selection process and added input and validation to the whole- I need a new ringtone issue– so now they’re calling my phone to see what I picked. Turns out no one likes Saxophone #2 but me. Oh well. Myabe if I told them my association to the Place in France song, they'd understand. But I'm not sure how appropriate singing that song to my male co-workers would be. I'm thinking it'd probably be pretty frowned upon.

UPDATE: So my phone just rang for the first time unexpectedly (every other time I knew someone was calling to hear it...) and #1 - it startled me. #2 - everyone in the hallway stopped and looked at me and #3 I laughed so hard I could barely answer the phone. I was still laughing when I finally picked it up, and the person on the other end said, "I'm looking for Brittney?" and I said this is she - and he said, "I... didn't recognize your voice..." Probably because I was laughing so hard.

Julie looked at me and once she could talk (she was laughing too) and said, "thats not gunna work. Why does it go down at the end like that? (my favorite part) It sounds like an elephant sitting down."

Looks like I'll need a new ring tone.

On the bright side - I wore all yellow today, in honor of summer. I look the sun. In a good way.

Also, Julie started the day off by falling out of her chair. That was awesome.

We've laughed so hard we've cried twice today. I think we've both had too little sleep, worked too much and need a weekend. It must be Friday.

Love,
Brittney