All you need to do is get a signal

I remember living in Couzens Hall at Michigan my freshman year and sitting next to the window in the hallway because that was where I got good cell phone reception. If I answered the phone in my room, I might lose the call even though this window was just 10 feet from my dorm room.

When my phone rang, I would hurry out of my room to the window.

This takes me to the second day of my site visit.

We went out to a meeting in one of the rural communities that my office works with. The village is about 45 minutes from the office. This village isn’t just off the beaten path. It’s barely on a path.

You have to drive the pick-up truck through a river to get there (I guess this what Oregon Trail meant by "fording a river." Zing.).

We got a ride there with someone from the village, but we relied on one of the municipal engineers (who was also supposed to be at the meeting) to give us a ride back.

Operating on Ecuadorian Standard Time, which can vary from 15 to 90 minutes later than whatever was supposed to happen, we arrived in the village a few minutes late. The engineer had already left.

No worries, we will just call him and tell him to come back to pick us up.

We all looked at our phones and none of us had any bars. We asked the community members which cell phone company had reception and where we had to stand to get through.

They pointed us in the direction of a house on the edge of the village green (green doesn’t really reflect the color of the grass). We went to the house and asked the guys there about cell phone service.

They said right here. None of us got service.

Then a guy, sitting inside at a window, said "no, right here." So one of my coworkers went inside the house but still had no luck.

We asked again and the local was pointing to a wall. I would say wall was a relative term here. I would describe it as a sheet of wood (that would make a good beer pong table) that separated his room from the main room.

We went up to the wall but still couldn’t get any service.

Now, he said, there is only one place where you can get service. He said you have to lean your phone up against the wall between the TV and a ledge and sometimes there will be reception.

Well, we couldn’t get any reception there either. Maybe we didn’t lean at the correct angle.

We went to the other side of the town to use a land line. We couldn’t reach the engineer because he was on the road back to town (where there is obviously no cell reception). We ended up getting another truck to come from town to pick us up, but this was a fun experience with cell phones.

Were we in "Black Sheep?" Mrs. Oneacre? Hello? Mrs. Oneacre...