The broken phone (a.k.a. life is weird sometimes)

So I’m uploading some pictures to my flickr account and I decide to fire up my IM client to check if a friend is on-line to try and give her what will probably be one of the first “virtual rings” she’s had, right?

Then this other friend sees me on-line and asks me to call him on his mobile phone, which I do, but try as I may I can’t get through to him. Apparently his brand new phone is dead, he can’t make or take any calls.

Now the thing is that his girlfriend (who is near the end of her pregnancy) is away in some god-forsaken corner of the country and is expecting his call. She’ll be worried if he doesn’t call her and he definitely doesn’t want to do that to her.

So naturally I volunteer to call her but… She doesn’t know me (probably never even heard of me) and it will probably freak her out a bit if a total stranger rings her up saying that her boyfriend asked to tell her everything is OK, so we decide that I’d better call another friend of ours (whom she knows) and ask her to call the girlfriend explaining what’s up.

(Confused yet?)

So I call the third friend, she calls the girlfriend, but the phone is unavailable and all she can do is leave a message in her voicemail.

A few minutes later the girlfriend calls my friend.
As it turns out, she was on a spot which had no coverage, but as soon as she got the message and checked her voicemail she immediately tried to call her boyfriend and, lo-and-behold, it worked!

Apparently my friend’s phone is just too darn picky about which calls to take!

Now who needs fiction and soap-operas with stuff like this happening in real life? :-)

(Oh and the original friend? Well, she wasn’t on-line. A shame really, she’s just the kind of person who would appreciate the humour if I told her what had just happened.)

Agenda for the week of 24-30, September 2007

During a brief excursion on my reference sites to find out what was going on this week, I came across a few things that piqued my interest (there’s a lot more going on all over Lisbon and elsewhere, this is just what caught my attention). I’ll probably not attend everything but I will try (and if I miss anything it probably means I had something better to do anyway). :-)

Wednesday there is the customary jazz session at Lux and this week the Santos/Melo Quartet will be playing there. I’ve never heard them play before and unless I can get an idea of their sound before then I’ll probably skip this one. (They’ll also be playing at the Hot Clube the previous night, but I do prefer going to Lux as the Hot Club is just too damn smoky for me. Yes, I know a jazz club is supposed to be smoky, but I really don’t like being forced to smoke other people’s cigarrettes in order to be able to listen to good music.)

Thursday Elle will be performing at OndaJazz. I’d never heard of the band before, but listening to the samples at their MySpace page I got the feeling I’ll probably enjoy it a lot (especially the cover geek in me. And the female-smooth-jazz-voice geek.)

Then, on Saturday, Bernardo Sasseti will be playing at Culturgest in what I think is probably the most unmissable event this week (although I was just about to miss it because of a birthday dinner of a friend, which got moved —thankfully!— to Friday!)

And finally, on Sunday afternoon there will be a tribute to Dizzy Gillespie at Jardim da Estrela, which is part of the Pleno Out Jazz series of concerts. I’m not sure who is playing this tribute, but then I already have an appointment at this time so unless it falls through I’ll probably miss it too. No biggie, though, I’ll just play my Gillespie records at home and pretend I’m at the park. Maybe… :-)

And that’s about it. As I said in the beginning, there’s lots more going on right now and this is but a small selection of candidates for my musical week. Lets see how it turns out in the end.