silence in the storm

We have the tail of the hurricane blowing through North Carolina today. There were several power outages overnight here. MonsterMustDie went to work as usual this morning. Two days ago, my Samsung 9+ cell phone died. It would start up and then the screen would go completely black except for a thin bar of green at the top. It was off and on the first night so I hoped it was fixable. Then it went black with the green bar permanently. I think I even heard a faint crackle from inside the phone when I held down the buttons trying to restart or shut down. So I went to the Verizon location near me with my non-functioning phone. Of course, they said I needed a new phone. Of course, they tried to up-sale me on services and even wrote up a bundle for me including streaming services, which I never use on cell phones and, even if I wanted to do that, John Stephens already has paid subscriptions to Netflix, etc. and I made the woman serving me strike streaming paid services off the contract. They did not take my old phone in a trade-in and didn't want me turning it in there because they said there was no way they could securely dispose of it or erase/reset the device. So I decided to try a Pixel this time. The new phone does not work. I got home and tried to go through the login procedure for Verizon and it put me in an endless cycle of requiring an SMS text for an access number to plug into my new Pixel phone. Since I don't have a functioning phone yet, I can't read or recieve a text or make a call out to customer service. I tried to use the chat bot and it told me service was down and to try again later. So, I still have no phone for now even though I'm now paying a lot more for no service.