Tag Archives: phone

Bringing a Landline Phone back to Life? Attack of the Battery Goo.

05 Sunday May 2013

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gigaset 4215Ever notice how stuff – stuff like your major appliances or small electronics – just all crap out around the same time?  Or close enough to where it feels like it’s all happening at the same time?  I have a feeling I will be going (cordless) landline shopping here soon.

A few weeks ago I was mourning the fatal blue screen crash of my beloved Dell home laptop.  Yeah, she is (was) a clunker so I knew I was on borrowed time.  I’m still actually waiting for the Windows XP recovery disc they are sending me; I keep getting email notifications that the order is delayed.  Now, how could XP recovery discs be that much in demand?

Microsoft announced a few months back that they will no longer be supporting Windows XP come 2014…meaning they won’t be providing updated security patches and updates, for example.  So if any of you are hearing this for the first time, if you’re still using a computer with Windows XP, it’s time to get something else.  Come to think of it, my old Dell laptop came pre-installed with Windows XP media center edition.  I wonder if the XP recovery disc would even work…not sure how different they are.

Now it looks like I will be going cordless landline phone shopping here too.  In the picture you’ll see my current landline phone.  Meet the Siemens Gigaset 4215.  Back in 1999 through 2006, I worked for a company that got acquired by a branch of Siemens, and we became eligible to purchase Siemens products at a discount.  I’m guessing I purchased this unit around 2000 or 2001; it was before I moved into the townhouse here in 2002.  In fact, I remember needing to purchase an additional handset when I moved into the townhouse, as I now had two floors of living space!

Anyway, when I first got this phone it was much more essential than it is now. My apartment had very poor cell phone coverage, so I relied heavily on my landline.  But after moving into the townhouse and becoming more dependent on my cell (plus getting far better cell coverage in my new neighborhood), the landline took a backseat.  The Gigaset handset is very comfortable and the sound quality is great; my only gripe is that the call waiting feature does not work at all.  But with caller ID it’s easy to see who’s calling and then call them back.  Given I don’t really use my landline that much, if call waiting does pop in when I’m on another call, 99% of the time it’s a telemarketer and easy to ignore.

…Which is why I’m keeping my landline in the meantime.  Huh?  What I mean by this is…my cell has now become much more sacred to me than my landline number.  Whenever I shop online and need to provide a phone number, for example, I give my landline number.  That way I won’t get potentially bombarded with spammy calls on my cell.  I do the same with email actually – I have a separate email address that’s just for shopping online and whatnot.  I don’t worry about getting spam in it, because the email account I value most is completely separate.

About a year ago the batteries that came with my Gigaset phones started failing.  I can’t remember exactly what kind they were, but they were AA size and some rechargeable kind. I guess a dozen years or so is a pretty good run for batteries, right?  So I bravely cracked open the back case and replaced the batteries with the good ol’ regular AA types.  This has worked fairly well, but the batteries don’t hold their charges very long, even in the charging cradles.

And then one day, I found a bunch of AA batteries on sale and stocked up.  Woohoo, so I thought!  But sometimes you get what you pay for.  A few months later when I picked up one the handsets there was this awful, warm whitish gooey goo leaking from the bottom.  Kind of like watery paper mache mixed in with a little liquid paper.  The batteries were leaking!  Oh great, am I going to end up with holes burnt in my furniture and burnt skin?  Yuck!

I carefully wiped the battery chamber and the outside of the handset with a damp paper towel and put in a fresh pair of batteries.  Fast forward a few weeks and once again, the white goo came oozing out of the bottom of the phone.  What the hell is wrong with these batteries?  The other handset was also having battery leaking problems, but nowhere near the one I keep in the living room.

The next time it happened the goo was so thick it had glued the back plastic removable cover securely onto the handset and I couldn’t budge it. The batteries were going dead and I knew I wanted to change them out and clean the insides again, but no luck.  Last night I had a brilliant idea of running hot water over the sealed plastic casing, and sure enough, it worked!  I carefully removed the batteries and cleaned out the chamber with a paper towel.  Then I got a little ambitious and ran some hot water inside the unit.  Was I crazy?  Possibly.

I dried out the inside of the phone, popped the batteries back in, placed the phone in the charger cradle and…nothing.  Nada.  But then a few minutes later I heard a tiny growling sound – it was the phone rumbling back to life!  Yes!  But the rumbling was short-lived and the digital display was gone.

I removed the batteries and let the phone dry out overnight.  This morning I noticed a small metal bracket from inside the battery chamber had come loose.  I tried gently placing it back in the phone and putting the batteries back in.  Nothing.

I think I have my answer.  Time to go spend some money.

The DVR and the Labradorite

04 Sunday Sep 2011

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I’m in one of those moods where I am feeling both a little anxious and yet blissfully, almost gluttonously relaxed. Here we are on a long Labor Day weekend and it is absolutely beyond gorgeous outside.  It’s sunny and the air is thick and hot with hardly any breeze.  Not a humid thick, though.  It’s that warm, gentle reminder that Fall is right around the corner.  And even in the heat the shadows are a tad long as we’re well past the Solstice. So I don’t dare bitch at all about the heat.  After all, this summer was a total bust save for maybe one week in August.  In the Pacific Northwest we appreciate and savor our sunny days, for we know the clouds and drizzle are just a few months away.  We pay a price for it being so green here.

I grasp hard at August, kicking and screaming as she wraps up.  There’s something about those last few days before September kicks in that make me feel a little whiney and cranky.  I don’t WANT it to be September!  Maybe it’s that deeply ingrained childhood memory of the end of summer vacation.  Yuck, I didn’t WANT to go back to school.  But of course once I did it was great…mostly.

So it’s a staycation holiday weekend for me…no worries there. Just getting totally random things done and also, just relaxing.  I decided to get into the 21st century even more for real and switched my landline over to my Comcast internet and cable package.  I found out I could bundle my phone service in with my cable and internet and pay less than I was paying for my current Comcast services (huh? wow) AND save the $55 a month I was paying for my old school landline.  AND keep my same landline number.  AND get a DVR for my TV.  What’s not to love about this?  I weighed the pros and cons…when the power’s out or when Comcast is down I’ll be screwed but then again, how often does that happen?  I have a super old school curly cord phone in my bedroom with the ringer turned off – I have it for emergencies and have two other cordless phones here in the townhouse.  When we had a two-week power outage back in late 2006 that old school landline saved me.  Cell phone towers were knocked out and we were pretty much brought to our knees, crippled with minimal if any communication.  I’ve been reluctant to cut the cord on my landline because of that, but then remember that that was a freak once-in-a-lifetime storm.  

So yesterday two Comcast dudes show up and within an hour, voila. I have a new, higher speed modem for my internet (which now hosts my landline phones too) AND a DVR for my TV.  Don’t laugh…I still haven’t converted to a flat screen TV yet.  I will. My old curly cord phone is now as useful as last week’s newspaper so away she goes.

They explained how the initial upload and refresh of the TV channels can take awhile which seemed reasonable to me.  They showed me how to set up my voicemail for my new landline service – all good.  I was very impressed with how helpful they both were.  And they even showed up a little earlier than my appointment timeframe.  Nice!

Guess it was too good to be true.  I waited a little while before playing around with the TV.  When I did, my remote was pretty much useless.  Did the batteries die?  Nope.  I could adjust the TV volume and mute the sound with it, but could not change channels nor get to the channel lineup guide.  Stuck!  God, help me…my TV’s stuck on the E! channel and just my luck it’s a Keeping up with the Kardashians marathon.  I can only stomach that scripted reality TV crap (krap?) for a few minutes at a time.  

So Comcast rebooted my TV and cable box remotely.  All’s well…or was.  Within an hour it froze up again…and Comcast had to reboot it remotely for the second time.  After that everything was fine for the rest of the evening.  As I was heading to bed I realized I’d forgotten to try the DVR out but I figured I would do that today.

I woke up this morning and decided to play around with the TV more before heading out to meet my good friend J for brunch.  UGH.  This time the TV turned on just fine…and then 5 minutes later the cable box rebooted…on its own.  It’s possessed or something.  HELP!

Comcast is sending out a crew to swap out my cable box this afternoon.  I was pleasantly shocked that they could do a same-day service, especially here on a Sunday, but I’ll take it.  It’s the least they can do to make this right.  

And yet, it’s just TV.  Sure I want it working right as it should, but I’m not going to get overly upset about it.  Now if it was Stanley Cup Finals or something that would be a different story.  Just trying to keep perspective…

…meaning it was a tough week these past few days.  My Dad’s cousin J passed away suddenly from a heart attack.  The next day my co-worker L’s Dad passed away after a long battle with Parkinson’s and dementia.  And the day after that my friend T was hit on her morning commute into work…her car got rear-ended on the freeway by someone who wasn’t paying attention and she’s still feeling the after effects, though thankfully not severely injured.

I was talking about this with J this morning over lots of coffee and a nice bacon and cheese omelette.  Yum, I may not even need dinner I’m so full.  She agrees, yes, it’s all about perspective.  Sometimes it’s hard to find that discipline within. I guess it’s ongoing Life Work.

We walked around the shops near where we had brunch…wonderful little boutiquey specialty stores full of everything from art to home accessories (my weakness) and crafts like rubber stamping and beading.  No patience here for either of those but it’s fun to look.

And we ended up in a fantastic shop we both love to visit.  It has tons of candles and aromatherapy things (oils, humidifiers)…and lots of stones and crystals.  I LOVE the chunk of Celestite I purchased there nearly a couple of years ago – it’s right next to me here by the good ol’ laptop.

Once again, something pretty much leaped off the shelf into my arms.  Labradorite.  The picture in my post here is of a polished sphere…my chunk is, well, wonderfully imperfect…half of it is polished and the other is rough.  Deliciously asymmetrical and hunky.  I love the greens and greys.  I asked the woman in the store to tell me a little about it. “It’s a magic stone,” she explained.  She pulled out a huge, well-worn book and turned to the page.  “Helps one remain calm within chaos.”  Ahhhh, sounds good to me.  Here’s more .

So my new Labradorite holds a tea light or votive too.  Love it.  And the woman who works there is so nice…she is very gentle, knowlegeable and grandmotherly and reminds me a little of a therapist I used to see about 10 years ago.

I’m not yet sure where to put this new beauty, but I think I’ll keep it near the TV and DVR for now.

After all, it couldn’t hurt.