Dropping phones, that is. Six days into our Cingular family plan, Noah lost his phone on the way home from Brian Lehrer. It took a dive from his pocket and whoever found it hung up on him when he tried to negotiate getting it back. (Why? Why do people suck?)

There is a long and circular story about why it is that I am looking for a new phone, not Noah, but I am looking for a new phone. A Cingular phone.

Update: talk about lazy web! someone already responded to my CL wanted ad. Noah will pick the phone up on Monday. I don’t want to count my chickens when I’m clearly sitting here with a bunch of eggs, but is it possible that people don’t suck?

Update: I am currently in possession of one LG phone that works just fine and came with the number to a pakistani restaurant in Queens. Yum.

Basically we did business with a somewhat shady guy who gave me a refurbished European camera phone, complete with plugs that don’t work in America (and an adaptor) and predictive text en francais. When I called Cingular to complain about getting many, many (or just 4) text messages that I can’t even repeat here because I can’t find the ascii code for the pinched delta symbol (Δ, but different) that preceded the at sign (@) and made up the whole of the message, so they said, sort of “Δ@” and nothing else, Cingular told me it was the phone and that I should return the phone.

They also said that shady dude was full of it when he said the only free phones we could get with our new family plan would be the same phone as I already have, the phone which began to break down about six months after I got it with a year and a half to go in my old phone plan. Cingular said that I could have any phone I want (ok, not quite, but they did give me a list) and they said that we should return our phones and cancel the contract and start over. They said we could do it by phone and they’d mail us the phones. We couldn’t do that, because of course Noah lost his phone while I was on the line with Cingular.

So we took my franco-phone back to shady dude and at least insisted on a phone with a warranty. I gave Noah that phone, because I am nice and because it is the exact phone that I don’t want. So now, I have my old phone and Noah has a new phone and I still basically can’t count on my phone at all. I only rings when it feels like ringing, it drops calls all the time, it says it has reception when it doesn’t. It switches ringtones at will. Switches to silent and stays silent for a few months and then one day at the most inopportune moment decides that it is time for its very loudest ring ever. I just want a phone that works and I don’t want to pay $300 for it, mostly just on principle.

I’m hoping to stumble upon someone who just happens to have a phone and wants to just give it to me. Just because I am nice. Noah will also be looking for a working phone in about six months but that part is not my problem. Not yet, anyway.

Before you suggest it, I’m also keeping an eye on Craig’s List, but if you happen upon a classified ad for a free-ish cingular phone that isn’t an obvious scam, do pass it on.