When I got my new phone Monday night, I ran through the activation procedure. Everything looked like it worked. I didn’t make any calls or send any texts that night, because I didn’t need to, and I didn’t expect to receive any calls, so I didn’t think it was odd that I didn’t get any. Imagine my surprise when I tried to make a call Tuesday morning, heard the phone ringing a few times, then heard a recorded announcement saying, “This account is unauthorized to make outgoing calls. If you have any questions, call tech support at. . . .”

I tried again. Same result. One of my co-workers tried to call another number, using my phone. Same result. I tried sending a text to my phone. It never got there. “This is crazy. I’ll wait until things are slower at work, then I’ll call tech support. But I’ll turn the phone off and conserve battery power.”

So after lunch, I turned the phone back on. It booted, then said, “Would you like to explore an expensive and useless net backup feature? [No.] Are you sure? [Oh hell yes.] Ok. You have 2 new text messages.” The test message I’d sent earlier had showed up, and so had another message. Apparently, all I’d needed to do was reboot my phone. I’ve had old phones with extremely simple OSes for so long that “reboot the phone” was never in my list of possible solutions. (I also work with Linux all the time, and “reboot the Linux box” is almost never the right answer.)

Anyway. Work also had a really weird permissions problem that I had to fix in a way that seems hackish, but it appears to do the right thing in the end.

Trivia: There were shenanigans. Real Jeff wasn’t there, so Fake Jeff was in charge, and there were problems with the sound system. Nathan fixed those problems (a cable wasn’t plugged in all the way), yet we still didn’t place despite a good showing in all the regular questions. Zach pulled up the hood on his hoodie and said, “This is my homeless bum costume.” “That’s a costume?” I replied. People laughed, which is what I was aiming for. Later, John offered dating advice to Kelli. “You’re taking dating advice from Tyldlesley?” someone else said. “Sick burn!” Zach said.

Mostly finalized the gun show plans for this weekend, too.