my morning call

(This is going to seem like a really boring story about cell phones for a while. Look at the bug if you need to.)

When I moved to NP, I had to dump Sprint for Alltel because they're the only thing going in this several-horse town. Two weeks ago, I signed up and got a sleek green LG phone that I turned out to hate. It seemed fragile, it was constantly asking me if I wanted to go online (I didn't), and wasn't sufficiently programmable (that is, I couldn't change the buttons that asked me if I wanted to go online to point me to more useful functions). So I went back and got a clunky little motorola that is didn't have any of the green phone's sleekness, nor any of its problems. It even has much better text-predictive software. I was pretty happy. So two nights ago, I set the "alert" to wake me at 6:30am yesterday morning (my alarm clock is still in some box). Yesterday morning I woke up promptly at 6:30am to the cheep cheep cheeping of the alarm. No sweat. Except it didn't have a snooze function. So last night, I investigated further into the wee moto's entrails and eventually found a "Morning Call" function. It seemed to have some kind of 5-minute repeat option, so I set it up, plugged it in, and went to sleep.

This morning, I awoke again to the phone's cheeping. I picked it up to turn it off, groggily stared at it for a while, and, while this seemed hard to believe at that hour of the morning, it appeared to be a phone call from a very strange and long number. I stared at it for a while more, still groggy, meanwhile also unconsciously taking in the fact that it's quite a bit brighter in my room than it generally is at the 6:30 at which I usually wake up. The thought occurs to me, slowly, that perhaps "morning call" really is some kind of phone call from alltel, like you get at hotels. So after quite a bit of the groggy staring, I figger, what the hell, and put the phone up to my ear and say, suspiciously, hello? At this point I expected to get, at most, some weird recorded get-the-hell-out-of-bed message, and more likely to hear nothing and to feel like an idiot for saying hello to an alarm clock. Instead of either of those two likelihoods, there's a very perky HI! Thoroughly mystified, I say hi again.

dum dum DUM!

It was my sister! calling from Morocco, hence the odd phone number and the strange hour and the perkiness. I am very impressed with the alltel morning call function--tracking down my sister and getting her to call and wake me up. I mean, yeah, the call was an hour late, but considering the time change, and how difficult it must have been for them to get hold of her, explain the situation, and get her set up to do it (she was boarding a plane back home), it's hard to complain. I can't wait to see who the caller will be tomorrow!

In other news, a junebug has moved in with me. They are really weird bugs. Seem kind of aimless. Right now it's banging into a plastic bag over and over. It makes a little bzz sound every time its wings hit the bag. My house needs a name, but Junebug House won't do. Junebug is a name already way too taken in Nebraska, alas.

. . .