A MEAN, SLOW DEATH

Not mine, thank God. Nor anyone I love. But still... if I didn't kick the bucket yesterday then I probably won't for a long time yet to come. Instead, the mean slow death that's happening is: to my beloved Kindle DX. And I couldn't be sadder.

After about 5 years of using it each day and night, it now needs to be on life support 24/7 meaning: the battery is pretty much kaput and the only way it will read to me is if I keep it plugged in and charged the entire time. And no... you can't really just buy a new battery to pop in and boom. Bring it back to life. Besides... they don't even MAKE my model anymore which is way too bad since I love it maybe more than other device I own. Anyway....

After speaking to Amazon, I learned the only product that has text to speech is the new Kindle Fire 10. Just my luck... the priciest Fire too, but what else is new. I then decided instead of just ordering a Fire directly from Amazon, I needed instead to actually go and see how all these Fire items look and operate. So I headed on over to Best Buy last Friday and the next you know... I'm now the proud new owner of a Kindle Fire 10 tablet. Not to be confused with my iPad tablet, btw. Don't ask. Anyway...

I then went to YouTube to see all how to set up the new Fire and figure out all it's features. I even Googled a zillion questions I had and as it happened... I was able to actually do the set up pretty well. That's the good news. The bad news is:

When I got to the part for which I am actually using the Fire... for all my books and the text to speech feature to read to me... I had to call Amazon tech support to specifically learn how to get my 350 books from my old Kindle onto the new tablet. Uh... after 4 hours on the phone and still not having all my books downloaded onto the Fire, I was ready to commit hari kari. Seriously. Granted... the lady on the phone was patient as hell, but still. I wanted to F the world by now and simply exit it peacefully via an overdose of champagne, doggy downers or SOMEthing. Anything.

To complicate matters... my wifi was not helping at all. On both my tablets, my internet connection operates only intermittently. Kinda like it has a mind of it's own as to when it wants to receive my signal or doesn't.  SO frustrating. So... finally I broke down and said THAT'S IT. To hell with the book downloads and I immediately called it a day with Amazon support. 

Instead, I called AT&T and said: PLEASE GET SOMEONE OVER HERE LICKETY SPLIT AND FIGURE OUT WHY THE F MY BRAND NEW WIRELESS WiFi WON'T CONSISTENTLY RECOGNIZE MY TABLETS! Enough of this bullshit, already. I TOTALLY NEED SOMEONE OUT HERE SINCE I AM AN OLD LADY HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT MODEM CRAP. And oh yeah... DON'T MAKE ME WAIT DAYS. I'M TALKING HOURS, HERE. Uh... thanks very much.

Bingo. The guy must have taken pity on me and yippee he was going to send a guy out the very next day. I was totally able to now give up the idea of doing myself in and instead, would patiently await AT&T 's arrival. Yay! Right on time, Kevin or Darryl or whatever his name was, showed up right smack on time and fixed the problem within an hour, I guess. Apparently I had two WiFi passwords going on... or something like that... and we needed to delete one, establish another one altogether and then sync all my six other devices to the brand new password. Whew. Mission accomplished, I'm happy to say.

By this time I was pretty much smiling and sat down to now begin testing the Fire's text to speech. BOOM. IT WORKED! Hallef'inglujah.

Uh... except for one major glitch, that is. THE HIGHEST VOLUME IS SO DAMN SOFT I CAN HARDLY HEAR THE DAMN THING. It's crazy. My old Kindle could be heard from a nearby room. THIS Kindle can only be heard from a VERY nearby table top. SO not what I was hoping for. I then of course Googled every and any complaint the entire world had about this volume crap and sure enough... zillion of others are unhappy with the quiet volume dilemma as well. So not what I wanted to hear. No pun intended.Talk about the fix being worse than the problem itself!

Which only means I'm back to square one. At bedtime I need my plugged in Kindle DX. During the day I can MAYbe use my Kindle Fire. Talk about mission being only semi accomplished. Trust me... already I can see that soon enough I'll be on eBay selling my new Fire, for I'm pretty sure the next generation will totally have the volume problem corrected. 

Of course I'll then have to actually LEARN how to sell on eBay given I'm a pro only in buying. I just have no clue how to sell. Spending money? I'm pretty damn good. Making money? Uh... not so much.