Tags: I see it this way! Heritage Shores Bridgville De E.W. Faircloth photography photographer telephone technical support Straight Talk Verizon AT&T text texting text message

I really hate ignorance from a technical support phone person.  You know many of them are reading from scripts and usually clueless about providing technical help.  It's really frustration to look for help from folks who know less than you. Tonight, I decided I wanted to be able to send text from my Linux desktop computer.  This is something I've wanted to do for awhile.   My fingers are two big for my smart phone and besides, I don't like texting.  But my wife and both daughters text all the time, so I decided to figure a way to text from my screaming OpenSuse linux box. A quick web search gave a number ways to do this simple task. My first mistake was the assumption that Verizon was my carrier.  We use Straight Talk for our mobile service.  Straight Talk in turn uses other communication companies to provide actual phone services. My next mistake was to call Straight Talk and talk to a support tech.  After menu, after menu, after button presses, I ended up with someone without an answer. Then I decided to use the chat with technical support function on their website.  I tried three times and each time I was told I couldn't send text messages to my phone, only email messages. What? Walmart has been sending text messages for years, alerting me that my pictures are ready for pickup. So I went back to DuckDuckGo.com, my search engine, and kept looking for answers. I found a post from a guy who said to send yourself a text to your email account, and look at the return address.  The return address should have your telephone number in front of your phone company's text domain: yournumber@textdomain.com So I used my phone and texted a message to wayne@faircloth.org.  Moments later, I get my text message with the return address of 856xxx41xx@txt.att.net.  I then tried to send my phone a text message from my desktop.  It worked!! That little experience provide me blog material, so I decided to contact the Straight Talk chat line once again to get a picture of the chat box. On the fourth try, a woman named Ashley confirmed my telephone number and wrote: Ashley: Please follow the format below: [10-digit phone number]@txt.att.net (SMS) [10-digit phone number]@mms.att.net (MMS) Example: 1234567890@txt.att.net She was totally correct, and confirmed my own find.  This tech was smart enough to confirm my phone number as Straight Talk uses different carriers.  My wife used Verizon not me:)