phone - Justin Foell

I recently took a trip to Scotland. I didn’t plan ahead to add international calling because I thought I could disconnect for a week. Sometimes the world has other plans.

After landing in Glasgow I turned on airplane mode and left wi-fi enabled. Not surprisingly, I received a couple iMessage texts from some of the Minnesota Brass staff.

What did surprise me is that I was able to send and receive regular text messages as well. I wondered if it was because I had enabled Wi-Fi calling. My suspicion was confirmed after I enabled it on my wife’s phone and text messages came pouring in 😩

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Wi-Fi calling to the rescue

It came in extremely handy when British Airways automatically canceled our flight home. An aside about British Airways:

BA is an excellent example of a company that has automated too many things. Our flight from Glasgow to London got moved by 20 minutes. We received an email stating that it had moved and if everything was OK, no action was required. Behind the scenes the automated systems at British Airways determined that the time to make the connecting flight was no longer sufficient and automatically canceled our return trip (without notification).
We tried to remedy this by walking over to talk to the BA baggage and ticketing agents directly at the Glasgow airport. But they’re just contracted workers that can check in luggage, they can’t do anything when it comes to reservations. The only option was to call.
We spent 4-hours on the phone calling and re-calling British Airways to remedy the situation. Calls of course were routed to their call center in India where it was extremely difficult to get through (usually a 20-30 minute hold time) and once we got through they were very eager to get us off the phone, stating that “the team is working on it.”
The fastest way I got through was to call American Airlines once they were open (who was the US partner for London -> Chicago). Then I gave them my ticket number and they transferred me to the BA support line, and somehow I was magically at the front of the BA support queue.
Ultimately half of our party got home on the original flight, and the other half had to stay an extra day.

Enabling WiFi calling on iOS

For iPhone, WiFi calling is available on every major carrier. Turn it on under phone settings:

Once it’s enabled you’ll see a “<Carrier> Wi-Fi” message at the top when you’ve got a good wifi connection.

You’ll need to verify your home address for emergency calls. Keep in mind that if you’re on wifi with the cellular network disabled, the address reported to emergency services will be the address you entered (likely your home address). So if I dialed 911 in Scotland they’d think I’m calling from Minnesota – be careful!

When making calls over wifi with your cellular service off, it will be like you’re dialing from home. No need to dial any extra country code stuff. Just mind the timezone differences 😎

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Mobile Phones. They’ve revolutionized the way we communicate, the way we ignore people around us in real life, and the way we attempt to kill each other while driving.

Before number portability came along, the turnover rate between providers was a hefty 25%. People would change their providers (and consequently their phone number) whenever a bigger better deal came along. Or they simply wanted to try out another provider because their current one is run, owned, and staffed by jerks, only to find out their new provider is run, owned, and staffed by jerks.

The phone numbers were ditched and quickly recycled for new customers. This was a major factor in the number of wrong number calls, voicemails, and text messages in the 2000s.

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The normal experience of activating a new mobile phone and number would be:

Turn the phone on
Dial a bunch of crazy codes (or have the sales guy do it)
Within 24-48 hours get your first incoming call from a total stranger

This used to be the norm with land lines as well, but it was because the phone company was knowingly selling your new phone number to marketing partners. In the early days of mobile phones, marketers were hesitant to call mobile numbers because they would potentially be liable for using up valuable minutes in your calling plan. I wish this were still an issue.

I’ve received some weird voice mails over the years. Some I’ve tried to save, but if you don’t listen to them after a while some providers would forcibly delete the messages. Did I mention the cell phone companies are jerks? Then texting came along, which made it much easier to archive such wrong number gems like this transcript from 1/29/07:

7:36PM From: +17025331017 Msg: Can u tell EJ TO GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT BELONGS TO ME
Msg: Who is this?
7:38PM From: +17025331017 Msg: Her ex
Msg: I think you have the wrong number.
7:40PM From: +17025331017 Msg: Itr armando
8:22PM From: +17025331017 Msg: Tell her to give Armandos shit back
8:38pm Call: Name unknown 17025331017

Feel free to contact that number. It’s probably not Armando anymore. They may be delighted to get a cryptic message from you though. Experience has taught me that anything revolving a break-up makes for the most memorable wrong number voice mails and texts.

The Escapist

After number portability, people would keep their numbers. Unless you were trying to get someone to stop calling you – like a creditor. I got a new number when I moved to a new area code (so I could blend in). My recycled number was previously owned by a guy named Mike. At first I got a lot of calls for Mike. They all seemed kind of nervous. Maybe Mike was a drug dealer.

Then I started getting calls from creditors looking for Mike. One guy was a bit more inquisitive – he had the intuition of a repo man. I told him straight up that I’m not Mike, Mike doesn’t live with me, and that I don’t know Mike. He asked me those questions twice to listen for any wavering in my voice. I didn’t get many calls for Mike after that 😎

Fat Fingers

Sometimes people just make honest mistakes. I sincerely hope that this woman got a hold of whoever she set out to contact. It sounds like there may be an issue with the toilet:

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Forced upgrades and planned obsolescence – almost all companies do it, but Apple has really advanced it from a science to an art form. I was holding onto iOS5 with my cold, Minnesota frost-bitten hands because I liked Google Maps as the default mapping app – you know, one that will actually deliver correct directions. But there were a couple of apps I wanted to install that required iOS6. Too bad I waited too long, once iOS7 was released, upgrading to iOS6 was no longer possible. At one point, iOS6 users were automatically upgraded to iOS7 “over the air” – meaning it happened automatically without user approval or intervention. Then there was a lawsuit which quickly stopped OTA updates. None-the-less, iOS6 is a memory, and while I thought I would only have to deal with Apple Maps and iOS7 generally grinding my “old” iPhone to a halt, it turns out there are many more bugs to be discovered.

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iOS7 is full of several major changes. I can handle the UI overhaul in iOS7. My dad says it looks like all the icons were redrawn by a kindergartener, but I’ll quickly get over that part. What I can’t handle is when there are serious issues with the functionality of the software. Despite knowing all of this, I still clicked that update button, and it seemed to go swimmingly.

Post Upgrade Calendar Blues

As soon as I upgraded iOS, I had like 27 apps that also wanted to upgrade. When I started the iOS upgrade process I had at least a gigabyte of free space on my phone, so I figured everything was kosher. The iOS update went fine, but when I tried updating my apps, I was informed that I had no free space left to work with. When I went to the usage screen, I was surprised to see “Calendars & Reminders” at the top of the list with 1.8GB. Normally it’s either photos or music (understandably), so WTF was going on?

I did some searching and was glad and annoyed that I wasn’t alone. I was glad since others were having the same problem, there was likely a known cause, and hopefully a solution. This guy with a 64GB iPhone had his calendar usage balloon up to 25GB! This other guy made a graph of his usage over time.

I was annoyed because I feel that if Steve Jobs were still around, he would have found the developers responsible for the terrible iOS7 calendar and said to them “One more thing… you’re fired!” He would have then put his best guys in there to fix the bug. But here I was 4 point releases into iOS7 and clearly this remains an issue.

The Problem

It seems iOS7 was copying all of my subscribed calendars to the phone. And since several of them have recurring events with no end date, it just kept copying them ad infinitum. I deleted some photos and some music and the calendar storage usage just went up to 2GB. So I deleted some more photos and some more music. I tried a couple of suggestions (see below), but before anything could take effect, it just kept ballooning up.

The Solution?

So I tried going into Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Subscribed Calendars and setting them all to “inactive” by toggling off each calendar’s “Account” switch. Strangely the usage size did not diminish and there were several of the same subscribed calendars still showing up in the calendar app.

I left the subscribed calendars “inactive” and went into the calendar app and tried to delete the very calendars I had marked inactive. In the calendar app, click “Calendars” then click the “i” icon next to a subscribed calendar, scroll to the bottom then choose “Delete Calendar.” This, in theory, would delete all of the subscribed events that have been (stupidly) copied to the phone.

I don’t know if I was getting impatient or what, but my phone was still hemorrhaging memory. I tried several other things:

Putting the phone into airplane mode so it couldn’t download anymore data (was it downloading or calculating dates until the end of time?)
Going to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Subscribed Calendars and actually deleting suspected large calendars (re-adding is easy enough)
Closing all apps (including the calendar) and then restarting the phone

I’m not sure which of these straws actually broke the camel’s back, but I suspect I could have skipped the deleting of the subscribed calendars and had a little more patience. If you’re having this issue, I recommend doing the normal “Delete Calendar” from the calendar app just before you go to bed, while your phone is charging. Then in the morning, close the all apps and restart the phone.

Where ever you are now Steve, we could use some of that classic Jobs incessant attention to detail that has been lost.

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Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Tag Archives: phone

Don’t have an international plan? Try WiFi calling

Wi-Fi calling to the rescue

Enabling WiFi calling on iOS

Wrong Number

The Escapist

Fat Fingers

iOS7 Calendar Storage Space

Post Upgrade Calendar Blues

The Problem

The Solution?