I was supposed to meet my wife at London Heathrow this morning. We were supposed to fly to Berlin together from there. But as it turned out, one of our old cats had taken a turn for the worse. My wife had delayed her original planned departure already for a week, to tend to the needs of our 3 old friends. Now one of them is doing really bad and I am afraid it might not last much longer.
Knodd
Mittens likes watching TV
Our daughter was away at Coachella. So my wife did not want to leave that on her to deal with when she came home and decided to put her flight on hold. So I had to cancel her flight again (LAX to London). Every time we do this, the airline charges an additional $340, bastards… Her flight from London to Berlin is a pure throw-away. It was a cheaper airline. There is no refund.
The promoter in Amsterdam also got really ill, and we had to cancel the show there. So I will be flying from Berlin directly to Munich.
All this got handled in a few hours of phone calls, which brings me to my next subject the iPhone scare.
I never pay much attention to my iPhone usage, since I was grandfathered in to an unlimited data, text and call plan. However when traveling abroad all that changes. I had purchased a silver international package for my phone, which included unlimited text, 200 MB cellular data and calls for $0.50 / min. That seemed to be sufficient and I tried to keep an eye on my usage. So I checked my data usage after 3 days and discovered that somehow my phone had devoured 8GB of data. Don’t ask me for what, I have no idea.
According to my plan the overage fees for the first 3 days alone would come to about $900. I almost had a nervous breakdown and called AT&T to see what happened. It turned out that the phone counter included data from way before my trip started, and the actual usage since I left was less than 100 MB. What a relief! Still a lot, considering the 200MB have to last for 3 more weeks. So I learned to turn off all the unnecessary services while travelling. Otherwise the iPhone will download e-mails and such in the background, which should better be done manually while on Wi-Fi in a hotel or hot spot.I also was told that I get a courtesy message from AT&T once my limits are reached.
Then I installed an app called Viber, which allows to call over Wi-Fi. So while in the hotel on a Wi-Fi network, I could talk to my wife for two hours without occurring any call charges, once she had installed the same app on her phone.
As I am trying to upload this to my blog, I was kicked out of my Wi-Fi from the hotel. I had purchased the option for 72 hrs and I think my time just ran out. I’ll try to connect later. Hopefully one day we will have ever present internet access and look back at these primitive times thinking how ridiculous and unnecessary complicated things were. Just like we look back now at a time before we had cell phones.
read on to part 7
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