Thursday 08/11/2022
The main thing today was to help set up sis-in-law Jean with a cell phone. Her late husband Bill set them up with Verizon wireless contract years ago. He had an in-house wireless router that distributed the 3G signal to three wireless phones around the house. Recently Verizon notified her that they were going to shut down 3G service and she would have to upgrade, which she took as a cue to finally switch to a smartphone. After looking at various options, I finally said, heck, we’ll just add you as a line on my T-mobile account. So that was what we were to do, today.
I picked her up at home and we went to her local T-mobile store, half a mile away. Unfortunately their San Antonio road store was closed for remodeling and they were getting an overflow of customers. We were third on the list and waited an hour. Then the rep said what we needed first, was a full account number and a transfer PIN from Verizon. Which meant going to a Verizon store. The nearest was in Cupertino, so off we went. After having gotten the requisite numbers there, we had lunch at a handy Paris Baguette store. Back in the car, I was going to use Apple Maps to find my way back to the Mountain View T-Mobile but it showed me there was a T-Mobile store right across the street from where we were parked. So we went there. The T-Mobile rep Yuri was super helpful and spent an hour with us, helping Jean get a start with her new iPhone 13 Mini.
A hangup, which was dreadfully reminiscent of recent tech calls at Channing House, was that Jean has no idea of their iCloud password. So we tried to reset the iCloud password but she failed to correctly answer the security questions that Bill had set up probably back in 2010 or so. Yuri tried to get the new phone set up to receive Jean’s mail but again she didn’t have the password to her comcast mail account. Sigh.
So back to her place where her iMac already knows the password for the email (but not for the iCloud, too bad). I thought I was going to be clever and use the Keychain app to show all these passwords. However, Keychain wanted something I had never heard of, a keychain password. I am logged in as an administrator, dammit. However I got Firefox to divulge the comcast.net password, haha. So we got the iPhone receiving mail. But weren’t able to get the Apple ID straightened out. Jean is going to keep trying on that, and meanwhile learning other apps. She also is taking on a new roommate/house-share, Sally, who also has an iPhone and will be able to answer questions.
That was about it for the day.
Codgerville 