jamesq | Carlos - Best Systems Administrator Ever

I bought a cell phone about twenty months ago. It had a one year warranty and I dropped it at month thirteen. I figured it was just the antenna (which had snapped in two). Antennas aren't covered by the warranty so I opted to put up with not having a phone for a week or two while I ordered ten new ones online.

Why order ten online? Because I keep the phone in my pocket and that means I go through several antennas over the life of the phone. If you buy them in a store they cost thirty bucks each. Buy them online and they cost thirty bucks for ten of them. I figure I may as well have a few spare in my toolbox.

I got the new antenna and the phone never worked right again. I couldn't get a signal most of the time, even when I was in line-of-site of a cell tower (as I am from my office at work). Altadore (where my Dad lives) was a lost cause because it has piss poor coverage most of the time. Add the fact that my phone had suffered the equivalent of a brain injury and I couldn't use the phone at Dad's place at all.

I went to my phone dealer and they tried valiantly to get Motorola to extend the warranty a bit. No luck. It would cost $180 just to have a technician look at it. The phone did work some of the time, so I figured I'd just suck it up until I could renew my contract and get a new phone. That would be in late 2005.

At one point I decided that it must be the antennas I bought online - maybe they were shoddy. So I went to local dealer and got one of the thirty dollar ones. Again, no luck.

So I was looking at my phone this morning and I noticed the rubber plug that blocked the hole where you attach an auxiliary antenna (for cars). I pulled the plug and I noticed the socket where the antenna goes was sufficiently loose that it rattled around inside the phone. Now the auxiliary antenna attaches to this socket from the back. The regular antenna attaches to the same point, only from the top. It seems the connection for both antennas wasn't actually connected to the rest of the cell phone. So I go looking for a micro torx screwdriver to pull my phone apart. I figure the phone is already broken - if I damage it worse I'll just pony up the $600 it costs for a contract-less phone to replace it. I'd cry though.

Carlos is one of the systems administrators at the company I work at, and he has all the funky tools for working with electronics. We pull the phone apart (where we discover a paradox - The phone actually held more pocket lint than it's own volume) and sure enough, the part that attaches the antenna to the motherboard had broken off of the motherboard. Which means the antenna was never actually touching the cell phone in a meaningful way. Every time I'd extended the antenna in the hopes of getting better reception I was in reality just engaging in a useless superstitious ritual. That I ever got a signal at all is nothing short of miraculous, it having less than a millimeter of antenna to work with.

"I can solder that back on for you", said Carlos.
"You can? Hey that would be great!" I replied.

Every time I ever try to use a soldering iron the fire department needs to get involved. It's embarrassing.

Not only that, he did it over his lunch hour and put everything back together for me. And I'm getting five by five on the thing for the first time in six months.

On the bright side, my voice mail works now. It took my phone being broken to get me off my ass and set my mailboxes up.