About three weeks ago, my old cell phone fell out of my walking pouch and I didn’t notice. Nobody is using it because, I am guessing, by the time they got to it, it had lost its charge. I called it and my call went to voice mail. So a week ago I ordered a new phone. Ed opened the back of the phone and inserted the SIM card and battery and I plugged it in to charge. Then the holiday weekend delayed my activating it.

This morning, after Ed left for a meeting, I looked at the instructions for activation and saw that in order to get the SIM # I would need, I’d have to open the phone. I couldn’t remove the back no matter how hard I tried. I called the Motorola company to get some help in how to do it in case I wasn’t doing it “right”. The rep told me I could find the info right there in my new phone. He tried to walk me through the process to locate this info. None of his instructions worked. Finally, he gave up and I got a dial tone. Cute.

I called Motorola again and got a different rep (yay) and that rep told me that a division of Motorola, Iden, supports my phone. No wonder the first fellow’s instructions didn’t work and he should have known that. The new rep transferred me and I was guided to the screen with the info.

After writing everything down, I called the Boost company and entered the imei no. (whatever that is) that they asked for and the no. was rejected. I was told that there should be 15 numbers – I only had 14. I pressed the pause button in order to look for the missing digit. The pause only lasts 20 seconds. I kept pressing it. Finally the auto voice said, “I can see you’re having trouble,” and I was transferred to an actual person. (I thought this was amazing!) This person with an odd name (Keira or something like that) guided me to the screen with the info and I had the number right and she said, “add a zero”. Duh. We spent another 15 minutes or so going through the rest of the process and finally I had a working phone. I could have kissed her.

Meanwhile, if I ever need to change the battery or the SIM card, I still can’t open the back of the phone and would need Ed’s help.

I was 25 minutes late giving Brunswick his epilepsy medication because no way was I going to stop the process after going through all the missteps.

Meanwhile, I am sure Ed tried to phone me and I couldn’t take his call, same reason.
***

Today is Ed’s birthday and it is also the day he is resigning from the ombudsman program for the elderly in Florida. It uses volunteers to oversee abuses in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Rick Scott, our Republican governor, used to be active in the nursing home industry (two of his executives are serving prison time for Medicare fraud and he managed to scrape through without an indictment -- none of the idiots who voted for him could remember or thought this was important). He has bent over backward to relieve the industry of any oversight and rules have been put into effect that now require volunteers to get written permission from the resident before they can meet about a problem. So a person with, say, failing health and/or mental acuity, has got to write a letter to someone he or she does not know about a problem he or she cannot articulate.

The federal government has gotten wind of these abuses and has ordered Florida to comply with their guidelines. Failure to do so would mean that funding for the program would be stopped. Well, Rick Scott would love that because the entire program would then go under. Scott has already refused a great deal of federal money and he won’t care because it is more important to him to coddle the nursing home chains and receive political contributions.

Ed does not feel he can be effective under these conditions. One of our good friends, in a salaried position with great performance reviews, was just fired without cause (because she was good at her job). The Tallahassee overseer who had made the mistake of asking for info as to who owned these facilities, was fired within the week of his request, and a Scott crony was given his position. So Ed is quitting the program. He has other plans for his volunteer work that I may post about if he lets me.

I have observed in the past that Florida in some ways is not as senior friendly as it used to be. This confirms that conditions for the elderly are not improving. Be warned. In New York City, as a for instance, I was not allowed to be evicted from my loft building when it changed hands. The new owners had grand plans to renovate and divide the lofts and charge up to $10,000 a month for the spaces. NYC protected me on two levels: I was grandfathered in even though I no longer had a lease, and I had reached 65. So NYC was just not going to let anyone evict me. NYC also has a loft law that prevents landlords from raising rents above 15 % and then only if they have made improvements. My landlord had doubled my rent twice and the third time, I joined a tenants group and we fought him off.

I finally accepted a monetary payment to leave and I did it because Ed and I had gotten married and I was leaving anyway. But if I had been on my own, I would have stayed because there was no way I could have found space for me and my 7 foot grand piano anywhere near what I could afford. That’s just one of the reasons why I still love New York and think it gets a bad rap.

xx, Teal