Problems with Communication

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before, but I never had a smartphone in the United States. My Motorola Razr lasted many years, and when I accidentally put it in the washing machine, I was able to find a used one on Amazon to replace it. When I got to South Africa, though, all the cool kids in the Peace Corps had a Blackberry so I figured I better buy one too. Bad move; mostly because it is a piece of junk. Well, at least the one that I bought was a piece of junk. It was fine at the beginning, and admittedly, it suffered a bit of abuse here and there, but it didn’t take long to start running slowly and freezing up randomly. Not long after I returned from Namibia it started to get a lot worse; the screen would go white and then just shut off completely. Also, the button in the center that serves as the mouse took a minute or two to respond or it simply did not work at all without restarting the whole device. By the time I came back from Mid-Service Training it was all but a paperweight. Another volunteer lent me a Nokia he bought when his Blackberry was on the fritz, so at least I had something that allowed me to check my email, check the weather on the internet, and communicate with other volunteers using Whatsapp (which, by the way, is a handy way to text back and forth with me, should you be interested. It uses data, but I don’t think too much.)

At one point, my Blackberry was up and running
it the remote deserts of Namibia. Those were the days.

The Blackberry was handy for a lot of things, though, so I didn’t want to just give up on it. BBM is nice, but not that important. The bigger thing was being able to download and upload documents and other files much more easily via email. And the Google Maps app was useful, as was the Twitter app. So not long after I got back from Pretoria, I took it to my shopping town, to a local “electronics shop,” and had it looked at. It seemed like the main problem at this point was the center button, which had completely stopped working. The guy at the shop agreed and replaced the button while I waited for about 15 minutes for the equivalent of $10. When he turned it back on, it appeared to be as good as new. How exciting! Not for long, sadly. The Blackberry was back to its old tricks after a few days, so it seemed the problem ran deeper than the hardware. I switched my SIM card back to the Nokia and figured I would give the Blackberry a rest until I had a chance to take it to Pretoria and try to “get it sorted” as they say here.

Unfortunately, that did not work either. When I took a trip back to Pretoria for a visit to the dentist, I made a stop at another “electronics shop” for a software update that I really thought would do the trick. No such luck. Boo! This guy suggested that maybe I get a new battery; another volunteer suggested maybe I get a new SIM card. But I was done at that point. I tried my best to fix things up; it didn’t work; time to move on. Let me say that I am not the least bit sorry that the company is looking at financial ruin. I look forward to getting an iPhone when I get back to America.