Can you hear me now?

Um, no, not really.

Usually when we travel, everything is just the same when we come home. This time it's pretty much like that, but with one glaring exception: apparently, while we were gone, Verizon was taken over by Zombies.

I should backtrack a bit and tell you that we had Verizon for many years and everything was fine; good quality, good connection. As we sailed through Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean we left Verizon and bought sim cards from a bunch of different providers using their prepaid data plans. We generally got a good signal while anchored in the harbors and bays of these third world countries, and sometimes even while underway.

When we got to Puerto Rico  (which is an American territory) we got an AT&T sim card and used it successfully in Florida and all the way up the East Coast.

However......
When we got to Rockland, Maine it did not work at all! (Apparently everyone knows this except me.) With our daughter in the hospital back home in California, I was in a tizzy, so we immediately went to the Verizon store and got yet another sim card. And it worked fine in Rockland where I purchased plane tickets online to fly home.

Unfortunately the minute I arrived home, Verizon's service became untenable. Dropped calls, no data, and "Can you hear me now?" again and again.

I called Verizon three times and finally found a tech who had an explanation.  She told me the signal was erratic because, get this, "You are around a lot of water." I didn't even bother telling her about Digicel, Claro, TelCel, Movistar, Tigo, and all those other providers I used while actually FLOATING on the water. When one runs up against this sort of lame service, it's best just to move along. There really is no way to reason with Zombies.

See this sim card? It's history! We'll be moving to T-Mobile as soon as possible.