Monday, October 6, 2008

Sometimes I Kick Myself...

I used to be the kind of person who was obsessive about reading manuals before installing new appliances/electronics. Neurotically so. I even read the electrical warnings.
Well, as old age mellowed me or hubris set in, I have become markedly more lax in this regard. I'm still not sure how to properly use all the features of my new washer and air conditioner (yes, it was an expensive summer).
Today I was installing some new phones. Now I've installed many new phones in my day. How different could this little puny (read cheap) phone be? Well, I hooked it up and though it worked for calls and call waiting (oh one day I must write a diatribe post about my feelings regarding THAT lovely feature....), the caller ID didn't function. Did I do the SENSIBLE thing and consult the manual? NO! Not I! I can figure this out all by myself. So I wasted 10 minutes fiddling with the various settings, then another 15 minutes on the phone with tech support, arguing with her that my phone line did indeed have enough voltage to supply caller ID to all my phones and not just all but this new one, and telling her that I had no intention of unplugging all my other devices that were working perfectly well, just to try to get this one errant phone to behave. Only while listening to this overly polite yet completely ridiculous tech person, did I, in my boredom begin flipping through the manual. It is then that I realized, this little phone needs BATTERIES for the caller ID function to work. Now, my first instinct was to be annoyed that the tech person wasn't smart enough to tell me that from the get go, but then I remembered that I wasn't smart enough to look at the manual. Kind of humbling actually {sheepish grin}.

2 comments:

rickismom said...

Thanks for the light start for the day. I must be getting old, cause I tried to change something on the phone without using the manuel, to "save time"!???

Mikeinmidwood said...

What kind of phone has caller Id thats battery operated. That shouldnt be in the manual it should be on the warning label.