As I reported last time, mr. cell phone met mr. washing machine, and bad things happened. Much has happened since then, but the bottom line is this: the phone is fine, the battery is toast. The sprint store no longer sells the phone and has no batteries. The battery shop can order an aftermarket, but they don't have any in stock either. The one store online I ordered from cancelled my order because, yup, they're out of stock. So I turned to ebay as a last resort. I found someone selling a battery that matched, the picture even looked right. I ordered, it was cheap with expensive shipping, just like you'd expect from ebay. They shipped it last Thursday, and it arrived in my mailbox on Saturday. In less than 2 minutes from when it hit my mailbox I had the package opened. I was ready to get my phone back in operating order. I pulled the battery out of the envelope, and immediatly noticed that the battery was black. Now before you say anything, I don't have anything against black batteries. My last one was silver, and the one I'm replacing is kinda a darkish grey, and that was the color I was expecting. Not black. I thought, ok, so what if it doesn't match quite right, I'm sure it'll still be ok. It wasn't. It doesn't fit, it doesn't latch, and the contacts aren't sized or placed exactly right - although they are definitly close.

This leads me to my new biggest pet peeve: non-standard cell phone accessories. Seriously, my last phone was almost identical in size and shape, I have two batteries for it that are the same voltage, but because the form factor is just slightly different they don't work with my current phone. The battery I was shipped, same story. All the electronics are the same, its just the physical size and shape of the battery. All of these batteries are nearly identical, yet Samsung hasn't figured out yet how to standardize it such that the same battery can be used across many models. Same thing is true for things like belt clips and whatnot... would it really be that hard? I'm not even asking for Samsung, Sanyo, Motorola and LG to agree, but within one company I would think it would play to their advantage. I can see the customer's thoughts now: "My last phone was a Samsung and I have all these gadgets for it, so I'll buy another clamshell Samsung instead of ditching them for the cheaper LG - I'll even have an extra battery and that's could come in really handy." Instead, here I am, with 3 cell phone batteries in perfectly good working condition all within milimeters of each other's size, none of which will work for me.

To wrap things up, I'm still waiting for the ebay seller to see what they're going to do. They requested the model # of the battery they shipped to me, so I should hear back from them tomorrow. Yeah.

In other, completely unrelated news, My dad was here last night, "passing thru". I'm still working on the bathroom, I'm getting in touch with a plumber to help me get the new bathtub put in. I just got my new copper-silver ion system put in my pool - that'll mean significantly less (almost none) chlorine in the water. And, lastly but certainly not least, I had the time-of-use electrical meter installed, so now can have the house a nice cool temperature at night and on the weekends. Funny thing with that, I actually worked the math out and for things like Typhoon that run continually, its cheaper with the time-of-use plan than the "traditional" plan, and that was before figuring in the weekends too. So here's hoping for cheaper electric bills.