Buying the Book

All I wanted to do was read a book.

The day was sunny but I'd forgotten my sneakers so I couldn't take a walk. I didn't have any errands to run or groceries to buy. My lunch hour stretched ahead of me like a golden hour of nothingness.

Sometimes nothingness is something.

I hadn't brought a book and didn't particularily want to waste twenty minutes running to B&N to buy one. Instead, I decided to download a novel to the Kindle app on my iPad. This isn't something I do often; I far prefer paper and ink. Still needs must and I was in the mood for Brit Chick Knit Lit.

It's a thing.

I sat in my car and went to Safari, because with an iPad you can't just buy a book straight from Kindle. I don't think. My iPad cheekily (see? Brit invasion) informed me I didn't have enough Cellular Data and would I like to purchase more.

Confused, I went to my iPhone and logged into AT&T to check my data plan.

I had an embarassing largess of data left on my little bar chart.

I went back to my iPad and tried again.

Denied.

So I bought the book on my iPhone.

I received the message my book was ready to read. I opened my iPad and discovered the book hadn't been downloaded - no cellular data, remember? Instead I received a very helpful message that I should retry.

Over and over again.

I called AT&T and sat on the phone while I waited for Chad to text me the last four digits of his social because apparently, even though the phone is in my name, is billed to me at my address, and paid for by me under an account with my username and password, I can't make any changes over the phone without Chad's information.

Chad never got back to me, so I disconnected the call and looked at the clock. Almost forty minutes had passed.

I drove to a local cafe and tried to log into their wifi.

But it was locked without a password they must brew into their coffee.

I looked at the clock again and realized I wouldn't be able to make it to Starbucks, but I could make it to work again and have ten minutes to spare to read the book on the tiny screen of my cell phone.

So that's what I did.

And I realized...

That was an awful lot of trouble to go through to read a book.

Sometimes I really hate technology.