I’ve been a Google Voice user — well, account holder — since it was called Grand Central, but I’ve never really used it except to test it. (I was mightily impressed.) But in the end, who likes giving out a new phone number? So my email signature remained in tact, I continued giving out the usual numbers (home, cell, work), and I never even memorized my new number.
And then the day before yesterday Rosanna’s iPhone 3G had a White Screen of Death. I’ll leave the gory diagnostics out of it — the LCD was dead. An Apple “Genius” said that Apple would fix it for $199 or we could go somewhere else and get it done for around $100 or go to iFixIt.com and do it ourselves for much less.
I changed my voicemail message, put Rosanna’s SIM into my phone, and ordered the parts. And then I changed my email signature to refer to my until-now-unused Google Voice number and added my Skype ID. Welcome to the 21st century, I guess.
Post Script
Oh well, that didn’t last long. The replacement LCD and tools arrived today (Monday) and my wife’s iPhone is now working like new (well, modulo one bad pixel — which I’m taking up with the supplier). Still, I’ve switched to giving out my Google Voice number and I’m sticking to it.