On Friday morning my phone had been behaving like it needed a
restart. It didn’t always wake up but instead often just stayed black when I
tried to open the display to check the time. In the late morning I restarted it
but it froze at the Alcatel splash page. I removed the battery and put it back
in but the same thing happened. I took it over to Freedom Mobile but the guys
behind the counter couldn’t make it work either. They concluded that the
software had failed. Fortunately I’ve had a bit of a windfall this fall because
of the retroactive payments that I’d gotten at the end of September from the
Toronto Housing Allowance program, so I had more than enough in the bank to buy
another phone. Their cheapest phone, at
$120, was another Alcatel, which I was told was two upgrades past the on
I had, plus it was between $60 and $80 cheaper than the one I’d bought two
years before. But I wasn’t happy with the Alcatel. Things started going wrong
with it almost a year ago. The alarm stopped sounding and it wouldn’t upload
photos to my computer were two of the main problems. The next cheapest was a
brand of phone that I’d never heard of and so I didn’t really trust it. I
figured the fact that it was so close in price to the Alcatel might mean that
it would screw up quickly as well. The next one up was a considerable jump at
$200, but it was a name I recognized and I’d actually had a Motorola several
years ago when I made my first short venture into phone mobility. I was still a
Bell customer back then and I was stupid enough to get sucked into a cell phone
plan that they’d offered me. This was before smart phones became so common and
so they sent me a Motorola mobile phone which I would have to pay off in
instalments but there were so many hidden fees that I told them after a month
that I wanted out. Since I’d already committed to the contract I had to pay for
a phone that I wasn’t going to use. Years later when I told Bell to go fuck
themselves and switched to Wind Mobile I took the Motorola to see if I could
use it through them, but it wasn’t compatible. I actually still have that old
Motorola in a drawer. Some day it will be an antique and I will become rich
from selling it. Of course though I will be 120 years old and I won’t remember
what money was.
So I looked at the
Motorola Moto e4. I wanted to make sure that it had a countdown timer
because I need it for work when I’m posing for artists. It’s likely that every
smart phone has a countdown timer (Even the first non-smart phone that I got
from Wind, the Huawei had a countdown timer) but I wanted to make sure. The guy
showed me how to get to the timer and it seemed fine, so I said I’d take the
phone. I had to pay with my bankcard, which I’d forgotten to bring, so I asked
him to switch the sim card from my old phone and I went home to get my
backpack.
The phone cost me
$226 after tax. It’s 2.25 cm longer than my old phone and half a cm wider. I
wonder if it will be clunky wearing it in my pants pocket in the summer. I
noticed when I got it home that the clock was exactly an hour and a half fast
and so for some reason it had been set for Newfoundland time. It took me a few
minutes to finally get it onto Eastern Standard Time. I took a siesta in the
afternoon and one thing I like about the phone is that I don’t have to push a
button to check the time. I just have to slightly move it and without fully
waking up it will briefly show the time.
I worked that night
for my second sitting of a three-week pose at Artists 25. It took me a while to
figure out how to set the countdown timer on the phone. I finally figured out
that the first two numbers one punches are seconds and adding a third number pushes
the first number into minutes and so on. The problem was that after 30 seconds
the screen went to sleep. My Alcatel had always kept the countdown on display,
which is what I need for posing. It’s useless to me if I an only see it when
the time is up because I like to give a two minute warning to the artists that
are drawing me and in general I just prefer to see the timer. On my five-minute
break I tried to figure out how to fix the problem, but then I had to pose
again. Fortunately they have a clock on the wall, so I was able to
approximately time my 20-minute sittings. During the third sitting I decided
that I might have to take the phone back the next day but during my break I
decided to ask if anyone knew a way to keep the display from blacking out. One
guy showed me that I had to swipe down to get to my settings, then punch
Display and then Sleep. Then I could choose from several settings ranging from
15 seconds to 30 minutes. 30 minutes was what I needed and that made sure I
could see the timer counting down. I think this is something I could have done
with my previous phone but when I had taken it to Wind about it blacking out or
described the problem on my blog, no one had offered the solution that I’d
gotten that night.
I was scheduled to
work until 21:30 but when I took a break at 21:10 everyone packed up. Peter,
the guy that coordinates the session had paid me as soon as I’d arrived. He’s
the first person I’ve seen running an Artists 25 session who does not draw. He
just sat at the desk the whole night, reading or looking at his phone. I asked
him what he got out of doing this. He said he gets a lot of reading done. I
suggested that he could read at home but he said he finds that a change in
environment is sometimes less distracting. He said he likes libraries for the
same reason. He added though that he’s also a filmmaker and a model and so
coordinating the Friday night sessions puts him in touch with artists and
actors.
I left work feeling
pretty good about my phone purchase and my newfound knowledge of how to use it
more efficiently than the old one.
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