Lost Verizon

We noticed the problem after leaving a store, when I missed the text that Elaine had just received: my iPhone had no cell service. Instead, it was inviting me to show my location via satellite. Huh? I restarted the phone and noticed an SOS and an unfamiliar icon in the top right corner. Huh again.

As luck would have it, we were a one-minute drive from a Verizon store — two or three minutes if you count the wait to make a left turn. When we made it into the parking lot, a guy was backing an SUV into a space, quickly and deftly. He seemed to be in a hurry. He hit the store right before us. “I bet we’re here for the same reason,” said I. We were. And we found a couple of more people at the front counter.

A Verizon employee tried to explain: there was an outage, but it was affecting only phones with “ease ’em.” (That’s what it sounded like.) No one understood what he meant. Oh, wait, he was talking about SIM cards. I added an explanation: if your phone has a SIM card (that would be an older phone), it’s not affected. That’s the little card that goes into a slot on the side of the phone. If you have a phone with a built-in SIM card (an eSIM card), then you have no service.

The Verizon employee asked me what kind of phone I had (16e) and insisted that it had a slot for a SIM card. I told him it didn’t and removed its silicone case to show him. Elaine offered to send a text on behalf of anyone in our small group who needed to let someone know that their phone wasn’t working. No takers, because everyone else’s phone was probably not working either.

One woman kept telling the Verizon employee that her phone wasn’t working. The explanation of the problem, such as it was, didn’t seem to be taking. I suspected that her first language was Spanish, but I knew that my Spanish could not have met the moment.

When we left the store, we saw two people just pulling in. They had driven forty minutes to get to the Verizon store. I told them what was going on and saved them a trip inside.

As you may have heard, there was a massive Verizon outage yesterday. It afforded a rare opportunity for some total strangers in east-central Illinois to find themselves in the soup together.

[Post title with apologies to James Hilton. after thinking up the title, I discovered that it was already the title of a 2008 episode of The Simpsons.]