SOL20: Perseverance aka Stubbornness

            Some people call it knocking your head against a stone wall. Keeping after something over and over even if you don’t get it. Some people call it stubbornness. But take the same behavior and (eventually) get results, and suddenly it becomes perseverance.

            After my husband died, I decided I didn’t need two telephones, a landline as well as a cellphone. And my flip phone was feeling more and more burdensome. I wanted a smartphone, with its connection to the Internet and e-mail and easy-to-type texts. But I didn’t want to change my phone number.

            I knew that it was possible to transfer a landline number to a smartphone, a friend had done it. So my daughter added me to her account, which enabled her to get a new smartphone, which she graciously let me have, and I called both my new phone company and my old phone company to request the number to be transferred. At first each one said to call the other one to start, but eventually they both said transfer was made.

            But it wasn’t. First, calls to the old number from my flip phone rang only on the old phone. Then calls to the old number rang nowhere; the old phone was shut off, but the new phone wasn’t receiving calls. The text function seemed to be working, although it was weeks before I learned that what I thought were texts (which run the phone service) were actually IMs (iPhones can text directly to other iPhones, but no other phones).

            Two months went by as I called the tech departments at both the old company and the new company every week, sometimes many times a day. I basically had only my old flip phone, which was a prepaid phone (on yet a third phone service), and I was using up a lot of my minutes calling “toll-free” numbers at my landline and smartphone companies. Somewhere in here I was able to make calls from my smartphone, but could not receive calls. And then I couldn’t make calls from the smartphone either.

            Eventually, I found a tech at the old company who saw that the problem involved multiple computer systems that were getting incompatible messages, and no human being had noticed, despite my constant calls to them that SOMETHING wasn’t working.

            In the middle of this process, a friend asked why I was putting myself through such agita—it was all I could talk about for weeks. “It’s just a phone number,” she said. But I was stubborn. We had had the same phone number for 46 years. Losing my husband and my phone number in the same year was just not acceptable. So I persevered.

            And finally, finally, finally, the transfer of number was complete. (There is a downside to having an old landline number. All those robocall companies have that number, and I get many scam calls. But it’s still the same number that Jack knew. In case he ever wants to call me from, wherever.)

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