Day 328 Baseball

Thursday 2 Jul 2009

Today I'm a pinch hitter for Teri; I'm to take her cell phone to centro to the Movistar/Telefonica tienda and get the chip replaced. Movistar is the cell phone subsidiary of Telefonica; they sell the chips and they sell cell phones. She dropped her phone onto concrete at school on Monday and the next time she turned it on the screen lit up and that’s all it did. She charged the thing all night Monday, but it didn’t work in the morning—kind of like a one night stand. Tuesday I went with her in the evening to a repair shop in centro that fixed it once before, but this time—nada.

I’m supposed to tell the Movistar people that I want to keep the same number and to copy the old chip information onto the new chip; this is Jorge’s cell phone that Teri’s been using all year and she’ll be giving it back to him in 28 days—nice timing, heh? At 11:00 I grab the phone, the current Telefonica bill (to confirm it’s my phone), say “hasta luego” to Yobani, and take off from home like a batter who just got his first major league hit. In the tienda where I was told to take it a guy tells me I’m in the wrong place and I need to go one block up the street. I walk in the right place and it has a ticket dispenser like the banks, but it’s a different application and I have no idea which button to press. A guard approaches and I say, “Necesito un nuevo chip;” he presses a button for me and I have my number. I look at the TV and my number is up—I start to shout BINGO, but think better of it, and head to a guy at a desk.

We have a really interesting conversation, I think; it kind of wanders around the ballpark a bit, but eventually crosses home plate and the final score is that only the Gs, whose names are on the bill, can buy a new chip, keep the same phone number, and copy the old chip information onto the new chip—like Mighty Casey, I have swung and I have struck out