Phone Switcheroo, Vaccine Arrives

[Note: this is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland.]

12/19/20

Aloha Everybody!

I’d complain about our cold weather, the frigid 65d we hit as our low the other night, how we’ve had to cope with our pool dropping to 79d, and the weather preventing us from having dinner outside by our pool, but that would be cruel, so I certainly won’t...

Ok, after much too much effort and wasted time, I finally made contact with two customer service reps who actually knew what the h*** they were doing, one at Hawaiian Telcom and the other at my new wireless phone service.  The problem was something called an account porting out passcode, which is needed for a new service to get the old service to release your phone number so it can be transferred.  As it turns out in the case of antique land lines, many local phone companies, including Hawaiian Telcom, don’t have them.  Unless you have an experienced and knowledgeable person at the new service company who knows this, you’re kind of stuck in limbo. The solution, it turns out, is simple – provide any number at all as the code and the land line company will accept it and release the phone number!  Once I initiated this process it took only 36 hours for it to happen.

So on Wednesday I slip-slided into to 21st century and if you call our old number it will go through as a wireless call to the new cheapo phone I bought.  This part seems to work pretty good so far.  There are still some wrinkles to work out with linking the house phones to the cell phone but I’m making progress.  At first I had some difficulty with Karen hearing me when I called from a location in town. Another issue is that if someone leaves a phone message it only appears on the cell phone, not the house phone base unit.  This is kind of a pain, but I haven’t tried all the options yet. A third issue is that the house phone in one room downstairs where Karen spends a lot of time has difficulty linking to the base unit, which is upstairs.  I’m experimenting with different locations for both to see if that will improve it.  Otherwise the other phones seem to connect just fine.  I’ll let you know how this goes.  Of course, most “modern” people just keep their cell phones with them at all times, so they don’t know what the issue is.

This week the state of Hawai’i received the first batches of the Pfizer vaccine and within hours it was distributed to the other islands.  Ours arrived and was immediately distributed to our hospitals and health care workers began receiving injections.  All this went very smoothly, a result of State and County planning, and even going through a practice run last week. As everywhere else, the first doses will go to health care workers and then nursing home residents, essential workers, and geezers with pre-existing conditions that would make their getting Covid highly risky.  It isn’t clear yet how this will be determined, but I think doctors will be advised of vaccine doses and can certify eligible patients to be vaccinated.  Depending on how much vaccine is manufactured and distributed, most of us on Hawai’i island could get it by late spring next year.  

Btw, I just read a very good article (https://www.wired.com/story/vaccines-are-here-we-have-to-talk-about-side-effects/) that urges an info campaign about the very likely but short-lived side effects of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines so that people don’t freak out when they get them (fatigue 59.4 %, headaches 51.7%, muscle 37.3 %, joint pain 21.9 % chills 35.1 %, fever 15.8 %). These might sound bad, but they pass in a few days, and the alternative could be much, much worse. Some of our travel vaccines have also laid us low so we are kind of used to this. Also, here's a summary of how the Moderna and Pfitzer vaccines compare in effectiveness at various age groups and pre-existing conditions.

Ok, off to market and beach picnic. Hang in there. Stay warm.