On Friday I lost my cell phone while attending a dress rehearsal for my 6 year olds ballet thingie.
We had to sit through the entire rehearsal and somewhere in the chaos of 10 billion girls in tutus and costumes and spaztic energy, I lost my cellphone.
I didn’t realize it until Sunday, and after a thorough search of the auditorium, the parking lot and the car and purse ( about a hundred times each) I called the cell phone company to advise them.
Only a couple of calls were made on my cellphone by whomever picked it up and given that I get nights and weekends for free, I don’t really care. ( You are responsible for all calls until the phone company is notified. Loverly. As in how can you make a call to them if you don’t have your phone. ) I chalk it up to my own carelessless and I placed the hex on the teenager that used my phone and did not turn it in for being a stupid shallow twit and a double hex on the parents for raising her that way. ( It has to be a girl. There were about 4 boys there that night and all of them under 10 years of age and all of them looking extremely sullen.)
Anywhoooo, I wasn’t able to afford a new phone, so hubby located one at his office that one of the guys turned in when he upgraded. For a nominal fee, I can have this old phone be my new phone and I have that number. For this gift of a phone I am extremely grateful and the bonus is now my husband and I have the exact same phone and don’t have to do swap out power cords out of our respective vehicles anymore, which is a total pain.
**However ** I have lost all my contacts. Every one of them because Verizon cannot transfer them from phone to phone unless I have the old ( lost) phone with me.
My library. My school. My friends. My sorta friends. My kids friends parents. Relatives. Friends of my relatives. Neighbors to my Mom. My Hairstylist. The doctor’s office. The pharmacy. Friends that I garage sale with. The book store’s number. My local movie theater. The Mega-Movie Theater. Used Bookstores. Salvation Armies. Goodwill. etc etc etc.
It is so mind boggling stupid that I want to go inside their office and stage some kind of hostage situation until all of my contact numbers are put into my new phones date base thingie.
I mean, how fucking hard can it be and they cannot tell me they don’t store this info somewhere. It makes no sense to me and thepeasized particle inside my cranium that hosts the Reasonable Gene for me.
WHY WHY WHY WHY!!!11111!!!1
They hate me and I, inturn, hate them.
Fuckers.
Er, I could be wrong, and I hate to rain on your rant, but I’d be surprised if your personal contact information was stored anywhere but on your phone. It’s not uploaded to Verizon Central or anything - it just lives on your phone. No phone, no contacts.
I’m guessing if you did have your phone, they’d have you take it into a local dealer and they’d attach a cable or something to transfer it over. I don’t think they can just magically beam down a signal to make your contacts jump from one phone to another.
Disclaimer: I’m a cell phone luddite, so I could very well be wrong. I do, however, know how software works, and it just seems silly to store personal contact information anywhere but on the memory inside the phone.
It is all a conspiracy to keep me practically Amish.
Anyways, didn’t Verizon (or some cellular company) get in a whole bunch of doo doo recently for selling to the government their subscribers names and their contacts, or am I remembering it wrong because I want to hate them even more?
Dunno if Verizon is in on the NSA sellout, but from what I recall reading, the problem was that the phone companies in question sold their subscriber names and the phone records. So what went to the NSA was a list of whoever you called, whether they were on your contact list or if you just dialed in the number.
Still, in general I think we should all curse the phone companies. So Fuck you Verizon crotch rot roach feltching assholes!
You lost your phone with your important numbers in it and that’s Verizon’s fault?
Yeah it sucks that you lost it and it sucks that there is no backup file of the data, but how is Verizon to blame for this? I don’t think any cellular company out there backs up that data…
Contacts are only on the phone or the sim card, not in Verizon’s database. There are some third party adapters and software that will allow someone to transfer their data from the cell phone to the computer. I have not tried any of them.
Verizon is named as one of three phone companies supplying data to the NSA. They are being sued for doing so. the Plaintiff claims that it violates Verizon’s Privacy Agreement. Verizon has denied supplying NSA the data.
I’ll bet they are - just not quite in the same form. I get a detailed list of every incoming and outgoing number to my Sprint phone on my invoice every month. I’d wager Verizon has the same capabilities. I can view every page of every one of my Sprint invoices going all the way back to day one in a .pdf from their website. Can you get your numbers (most of 'em anyway) from the Verizon website perhaps, Shirley?
More despicable, but not connected to cell phone use (to my knowledge). According to USA Today on Monday (I think), the NSA purchased phone records (not contents) from three major phone companies, including Verizon. Some three days later, Verizon denied this (it must have been late last week that this came out).
My guess? Bush admitted it at first, and later the White House spinners came along and said that he’d been talking about the so-called eavesdropping program. I think the NSA went and leaned on the phone companies (all of which have denied it now) because they realize that there’s simply no way to legally justify the widescale monitoring of phone calls, so it has to “never have happened.” Since Verizon and its fellow betrayers were taking a fair amount of heat, I’m sure they would have been happy to oblige, especially since they could feel pretty confident of not being prosecuted under the circumstances.
Somewhere in “Get it Now” there is a utility that you can buy/dowload/whatever that will save your contacts to a central server. It’s called “Backup Assistant”. You can use it for the next time you and your phone are permanently separated.
WTF? The contact info you are complaining about is stored on your phone. How the fuck are they supposed to have it. Sure they have a record of numbers you call. You can look at past bills and try to reprogram your contacts that way, but Verizon has nothing to do with your personal contacts list. That would be like blaming Microsoft for not being able to reformat your hard drive and install a back-up copy of all your previously saved information.
I have a “backup assistant.” It’s called an address book. I’ve had one for years and years.
Actually, I lied. I don’t carry a cell phone, so my address book is my, uh, “primary assistant,” I guess.
In all seriuosness, I know it must suck to lose all that data. Much like that sinking feeling I got one time when my floppy disc got magnetized or something and I couldn’t pull the files off it. All that data lost. It is a helpless feeling.
But I still can’t get over the fact that so many people have totally given up on the concept of writing down people’s names, addresses, and phone numbers in an address book. Sometimes the older, simpler ways are best. (I guess, until you can’t find your address book and then you are still up a creek.)
Aw man, I left my phone on the bus today, and the loss of contact info/numbers was something I hadn’t even thought of.
I called the phone company to block it right after I got to work and realised it’d fallen out of my pocket. If it doesn’t show up at Mississauga Transit’s lost and found in the next couple of days, I’ll have to get a new phone.
My only suggestion, and this is a pain too, is to get the phone records for the last few months from your Verizon bills and reenter the numbers. The bills are probably available online, so you wouldn’t need to wait for them to mail it, or pay a fee.
If you are inclined, you might be able to get some adapter that lets you connect an address book on your computer to your phone. You can then easily create the list on the computer and upload it to your phone. After adding numbers on the fly you could download the additions/changes back to the computer. Then you would have your backup phone list and be ready to load it into your next phone.
While I am not a fan of Verizon, I have their phone and service for the present. I lost my phone with the nice color screen and had to go back to my previous simpler B&W one. I am annoyed with it because it’s an older model with a really slow CPU.
When I lost mine I just had them copy the address book from my wife’s phone over to my phone. I added a few names but mostly we just have hers and mine stored on the in one list on both phones for ease of use.
[sub]Man, either I must type faster or preview or something. I reiterated aktep, askeptic, …, UncleBeer between reading the posts and posting my response. Didn’t mean to plagarize. {slinks away}[/sub]
The company I work for is a specialty insurance provider, replacing lost, stolen and damaged cell phones (for Verizon, among other clients). Sooooo many people are shocked that their personal contact lists aren’t harvested into some sort of central database. If they thought twice about it, I think most people would be GLAD that their wireless provider didn’t steal such information from them.
True. But as noted, they don’t have names attached to them. For less used contacts, it will be hard to tell which was the prospective client and which was the hot chick from the bar whom I’m never going to call and whose number I never should have gotten (happens every time I go with tequila). Some phones also will store addresses and email info if you are arsed to input them (I am).
