Day: February 20, 2008

Almost three years ago Jabley got Vonage. He’s my guinea pig for cool new tech toys, and I’ve wanted it since then. The delay for most of that time has been over the 911 issue. Cel phones are actually tracking you all the time to know where you are, but Vonage doesn’t. The phone number you have may not be related to your geography at all, Jabley cites people using American phone numbers even though they’re based in India. This means that if you dial 911, you might not get the right service.

How smart are we? We finally realized that Vonage is for the house, it won’t replace our cel phone. We can tell Vonage with the right 911 is, and it will always be right. Duh.

So I called and got it. It works perfectly. Reception is clear as a bell, all the features I could ask for, long distance is no distance, etc. I’m especially glad that we kept our old phone number. It will cut our phone bill in half, that’s $300 a year. I even got two months free by putting Jabley as a referral.

But then…

• Activation, buying the physical unit, shipping it me: $50.
• I naively pictured that all our existing phones would continue to work. In reality, Vonage is a physical unit that the phones must plug into. That means we had to buy a phone system with a master unit and a few slaves. And these new ones can’t be outside which means our outdoor phone is gone. $99.
• TiVo: TiVo uses the phone system to update itself. Although there are ways to hook it into Vonage and dial, it makes more sense to connect it to the home network. I broke down and bought the wireless adapter: $65, thank you Circuit City.

After all this saving money, I’m over $200 in the hole!

When I’m asked who I support, my answer is Hillary but I really like Obama also it’s a close call bla bla as long as it’s a Democrat who wins the whole thing bla bla bla. I finally came up with an analogy I like:

You and the guys are getting some dinner. You have two choices. One is pizza. The other is tofu sandwiches. Of course, you all want pizza. Some people want mushrooms, some want onions on top. The arguments start. You compare the relative merits of both toppings. You question everyones knowledge. You question their motivations. You question their sanity. The more you talk about it, the bigger the differences get. The drug connotations of mushrooms are examined. Breath freshness of the onion lovers is tested. The arguments go on.

But one thing everyone can agree on, no one wants the tofu sandwich. As long as we get pizza instead of tofu, I’m basically happy. I like onion over mushrooms, but either is fine by me.