I called Sprint PCS customer service last night -- for a few days, my cell phone has been sending all calls straight to voicemail, and then alerting me I have voicemail. So it's not ringing or flashing or anything like that when a call comes in, but everything else seems okay. Not a tremendously horrible problem, but seems worth fixing, or at least figuring out why my phone has gotten too lazy to ring. In my mind, I've concluded that I did something to cause this -- I sent a couple of calls straight through to voice mail Friday afternoon, and since then the phone hasn't rung, so maybe it figured, after I sent two calls right to voice mail, that I never want it to ring again. Or maybe as I was pushing the button on the side to send the calls to voicemail, I accidentally pushed some combination of buttons that said to do this permanently, and I just can't figure out how to unpush them. But anyway, I called Sprint, and the woman ran the phone through a number of "tests," had me remove the battery, had me punch in a bunch of codes, stuff like that -- got me "restarted on the system," and nothing worked. She said my phone is "probably broken" and I should go to a Sprint store. At the end of the call, she asked me to rate her service on a scale from 1-10. I told her she was very nice, but since my phone still isn't working, I don't really know what to rate it. She said she needed me to rate her service, "for quality control." Again, I said that she was very nice, but since the phone isn't working, I'd have to give "the service" a 1. She said she didn't need me to rate "the service" but "her service." So I told her I'd give her a 10, but the service a 1. She said, "Oh, a 10. That's very sweet of you. Thank you so much." "But my phone still doesn't work...." Click.

Any amateur cell phone technicians who have any clue, before I go to the Sprint store later to let them tell me I need a new phone, I'll forward you a $5 gift certificate from Amazon.com that I got at work from the Lexis rep for answering a Lexis trivia question if you can tell me how to fix my phone and it works.

UPDATE: My phone randomly started working again about an hour after I went to the Sprint store, saw the unbelievably long line, and left without going inside. I guess that scared the phone too. I don't know why it's working again, but there are many mysteries of life that I don't need to understand.