"Does Howdy Doody have a wooden ass?"

That's what my wife, Stacy, screeched when I asked whether she would be canceling her Verizon mobile account. I guess that was a yes.

It all started when the flip part of her Motorola phone flipped off, hanging by a thin wire. When she went to the Verizon store for some assistance, she was told to call customer service--but the two ding-dongs at the store wouldn't even let her use their phone to call. So she went MacGyver and rigged her phone to work--barely--with a headset.

This assistant ding-dong, again, pretty much offered to hold the door open while she walked over to Sprint.

Pissed off, sitting out in the parking lot, gingerly dialing a shattered phone, she called Verizon customer support and calmly explained the situation. She has a New Every Two deal, making her eligible for a new phone in six weeks anyway. Could they just bump that up to today?

Uh, no.

At this point, I should tell you that Stacy's been a Verizon customer since before it was Verizon; she signed up when it was GTE Mobile 10 years ago.

Stacy: "Are you telling me you'll let me switch to Sprint over a measly six weeks?"

Customer service: "Well, I see your point ma'am." Ah, now we're getting somewhere. "You do know you will have to pay an early termination fee."

Oh, God.

Incredulous, she kicked it up to a supervisor. This assistant ding-dong, again, pretty much offered to hold the door open while she walked over to Sprint.

She called Verizon support again (while staring at a poster in the store window that reads "When you call Verizon, your problem becomes our problem"). The senior ding-dong she talked to apparently didn't get that memo; he also shrugged and prepared to let a 10-year customer walk. (And this from the cellular company that arguably wins the most customer service accolades.)

On the next try, Stacy finally got somewhere: a Verizon call center, where they realized that if her phone is broken, she can't use their service--you know, that thing she gets billed for every month.

So after about two hours of in-store and on-phone wheeling and dealing, a couple of moral support calls to the Cell Phone Diva, and enduring "customer service" that would make the Dalai Lama spew obscenities, Stacy got her phone replaced, and in six weeks, she'll still be able to take advantage of the New Every Two plan that entitles her to get $100 off a new phone, which will probably be so overpriced that she won't even notice there was a discount in the first place. But I digress.

In the end it worked out, although there was something unsatisfying about doing all that work just to end up with the same phone and plan she already had. Would you have stayed with it as long as she did? I don't think most people would, and that is a form of unspoken cost control for mobile phone companies.

I fear the passing of the Kodak moment
The digital camera is putting it in jeopardy. All the regular folks I know are moving to digital cameras--even my dad, who has never touched a PC or clicked a hyperlink. And I'd guess 95 percent of these people are about as good at managing digital photos as I am at wearing a bra.

Some don't know how to get the pictures off of the camera. Others can get them out of the camera but have no idea where they should go. And still others know exactly where the pictures are: on the C: drive--the one that just suffered a massive crash and doesn't have a backup.

Bye-bye memories.

Throughout modern history, some of the more important and moving images that record our society have come from amateur photographers.

This isn't a trivial issue. Throughout modern history, some of the more important and moving images that record our society have come from amateur photographers. And millions of shoe boxes and drawers are filled with the photographs that represent entire life histories. Those histories have proven pretty rugged, thanks to the stubborn durability of paper photographs, film negatives, and the elegant way they slowly degrade.

But digital photos are binary in the worst way: they either exist or they don't. Hard drives are notorious for crapping out, and even CDs aren't supposed to be good for more than about 30 years. Compare that to photos and negatives that can easily endure a century of dust, fingerprints, and coffee spills, yet still deliver a decent image most of the time.

Of course I know that data backups are the solution, but let's be serious. I'm talking about normal people here, and they are not backing up regularly. If you're a photographer like me, you get what I'm driving at: the sanctity of analog images. Are we OK with them being so easily forgotten?

It's creepy
And the little creep in me loves it. Rafe Needleman's recent column pointed out an e-mail tracking service that I read about with great relish.

The DidTheyReadIt service actually sends you reports about how your recipients dealt with your e-mail messages. The report tells you when they opened it, how long they spent reading it, and where they were (roughly) when they read it.

It's shockingly nosy. So of course I signed up for it.

Unlike the return-receipt feature you find in e-mail clients, this one isn't known to the recipients, nor can they decline to send you a receipt.

But it begs the question: Are you being a slimeball for monitoring people's behavior without their knowing? I can't detect a consensus around the office on this one, and I'm personally on the fence as well.