First there was the plot: back in July, when my husband and I first got very disillusioned with Verizon, we planned and we schemed. We were going to leave Verizon for AT&T. We were going to get iPhones. We were finally going to join the rest of the world.

But first we had to wait for about ten phone contracts to expire. See, when you have a fifteen-year-old son who either breaks a phone every other week, gets a phone submerged in water, or gets a phone for his birthday, you find that he, alone, has about five contracts that have to end before you can switch, so you can avoid thousands of dollars in penalties.

So then the day came: October 28th, the same week my BlackBerry died. We walked in AT&T and walked out about a hundred hours later and a lot poorer with our iPhones.

And then we found out a really amazing thing. We can't actually get any phone calls on this thing. Why didn't people mention this? Hadn't I opened it up for a vote on Facebook - iPhone or BlackBerry? A vote that went resoundingly in favor of the iPhone? And could this just be why all my sisters send texts to each other instead of calling nowadays? 

Had we been warned? Well, people had said things about coverage but I thought the coverage problems were like in out of the way places, like rural villages, or along the Ganges River in India. I wasn't greedy, after all. I didn't expect to have cell phone coverage if I was hiking in Nepal or staying in a log cabin for a week in rural Arizona.

But this is serious. I somehow live in a black hole. There's no coverage in my house or neighborhood and no coverage as I drive around town, going in and out of hot spots, calls dropping off my phone. Now, when my phone rings, I look at it with dread. thinking, "Why is someone calling my cell phone?" I mean, don't they know that it's just a gadget for Facebook, Twitter, eBay and Angry Birds?

So we begin plotting again. Only one year and eleven months to go...