When the minidisk player I bought in college turned obsolete about two weeks after I bought it, I sought treatment for early adopter disease. It's been in remission ever since, and life has been good. Without it I have free time to participate in sports, and other activities, and be a social person. I also have beer money. Life has been good. But recently things have taken a turn for the worse: I tried VOIP.
Enter BroadVoice and the Snom 360. I don't even have the energy for a full rant, because it just pains me to think about the 8 hours of my life wasted getting these two supposedly fully featured things to work at all, let alone together - not to mention the $150 the Snom phone set me back. For my $150 I got a pretty cool high-end office phone with a setting disabling it from receiving calls. That's right, it's the "broken" setting. Unfortunately, next to the "o On o Off" selection in the settings page, it's labeled "Call Complete" - which isn't nearly as descriptive as it should be. "Do you want your phone to act totally broken?" would be infinitely more helpful. Six hours to fix that one.
There's also this thing called DTMF, which, for the rest of us, means touch tone type. Apparently there are multiple types, and apparently whichever one my phone is set to won't activate phone menus on, say, the BroadVoice help line. I call BroadVoice to wonder why my phone won't receive calls ("Call Complete = off") or why I can't dial menus (DTMF issues) and the menu says "press 1 for technical support" I press "1" and nothing happens. Eventually it tires of me, says it can't route my call, and hangs up. Good thing nobody leaves me voicemails, cause if BroadVoice won't let me talk to tech support, what do you think the chances are of them letting me listen to my voicemails? And that's to say nothing of SpinVox not integrating with the "Call Forward Do Not Answer" feature of BroadVoice at all, let alone as seamlessly as it works with Verizon Wireless. Who'd have thought I'd be holding up Verizon as an example of how to get technology right? Now instead of saving cell phone minutes (the point of this whole VOIP adventure) it's actually costing me more minutes because I need to call BroadVoice tech support on my Verizon cell phone. Time spent: 2 hours. Still not fixed.
This could be another life-threatening flare-up of early adopter disease. I barely escaped college without being consumed by it, and I'm worried. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and there'll be an iPhone next to my bed and I'll have a chumby as an alarm clock. The Horror!
* Update: So the incoming calls aren't working, again. And, upon closer scrutiny of the "Call Completion" option, it isn't as I had suspected. At least according to Snom's online manual. But that was the last setting I changed to make things work... so now I'm totally stumped. Again. 8.5 hours wasted, and counting...
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