My cell phone would not make one phone call after work yesterday. Mr. W kept trying to call me on it and said he just got a “service out” automated message. When I dialed, “Connection error” or “Network busy” would appear on my screen. It was pretty frustrating. We went to a Cingular store and the salesperson explained that a couple of the Cingular cell sites went down, and it’d been down since 4pm that afternoon. Today, I tried the phone again in the morning. The message “connection error” still flashed on the screen when I pressed “send.” I used Mr. W’s phone to check my voice mail. My mom had left a stern-sounding message asking where I was at 8:30p last night. I called them at home and left a message on their machine explaining the phone issues and leaving them Mr. W’s cell number. We checked with a Cingular kiosk earlier today, and the girl at the booth told me that Cingular is phasing out AT&T cell sites, so they’re doing major maintenance stuff and switching certain numbers from one source tower to another, so some numbers may be down for a few hours. I explained it’s been over 24 hours. She said sorry, there’s nothing they can do, but service should restore itself on my phone automatically.

It wasn’t until half an hour ago that my mom called Mr. W when we were sitting in his living room watching a DVD of United 93. My dad’s in the hospital. He’d been there since last night. They couldn’t reach me on my cell all day, and she hadn’t been home to get my message until now because she was at the hospital with him all day, and didn’t even leave his side to eat. He hadn’t been feeling well in his stomach for the past 2 weeks, but figured it’d go away. In the middle of the night Thursday night, my dad got up and was instantly having cold sweats, then he felt too weak to stand. But like a typical stubborn Asian person, he still went to work the full day on Friday. That night, he realized it was internal bleeding, and went to the family doctor, who confirmed the internal bleeding and told him to go into the emergency room right away. His blood pressure was 80/70-something. In the hospital, they paged the on-call doctor over and over, starting at 11a, and the guy didn’t wander in until 4p. Anyway, it’s too late to visit him tonight, but I’m going to go in the morning. He has some procedure scheduled for 10a, so I’ll be there to talk to the medical staff in case there’s any language barrier for understanding instructions or situations. I also called the hospital and talked to my dad, who seems to feel that this isn’t a big deal — at least that’s how he’s putting it to me.

My phone STILL isn’t working. My dad better be fine. If this is the last conversation I have with him I’m going to !@#$ sue the ass off Cingular.