We have been off-line for more than a week as we tried to magically make our new phone work.

It turns out the whole thing comes down to cards.  When you get a new phone with our carrier, you must have the correct card; the SIM card that is.

We didn’t have it.  We had something that looked like a SIM card that we found on Santa Monica Blvd. near where Barney’s Beanery is located past where the International House of Pancakes sits.  It was slightly covered with syrup as if someone had been holding it in their sticky fingers and yet their fingers were not sticky enough — a common magician problem for folks of our advanced age.

So we figured, why pay for a SIM card when we had a perfectly good one if we could clean it up right.

There was a part of us that said we should bring it back to the IHOP and turn it in as lost property.  But we didn’t cuz it looked like it had been there for a while and we really needed one for our phone.

We cleaned it with a diluted mixture of Dawn (good enough for oil covered marine animals, good enough for SIM card covered with syrup) and warm water.  We dried it with the side of our jeans (the outside) and pushed it into the SIM Slot (ironically, that was the name of our first slot machine that we tried to sell in Vegas, but failed).  It fit.  All was good with the world.

We worked on the project for days.  We could not get it to work.  We were too embarrassed to bring it back to the location between Barneys and IHOP but we needed our phone to work.  We found the phone in a trash bin we were diving looking for interesting menus of local restaurants that delivered.  It was inside a well-damaged suitcase.  We left the clothes (except for the bandana — a good magician can’t have too many bandanas and we’re not even that good but still have the need).  It was dark so we didn’t know if the phone was cracked but turns out it wasn’t.

We reset the phone because of the thousands of pictures on the phone.  Nothing untoward just cats and more cats.  There was one picture of a cat in a tiger Halloween get-up and he/she did not look happy so we didn’t even save that one.

Bottom line: we got a practically new phone, some bandanas and a chance to talk to our carrier’s customer service desk.  We know that everyone complains about customer service chat sessions but we cannot in this instance.  The helper helped and real quick like.  She did some magic to make the SIM card come to life, make the phone work with the SIM so we could post on InsideMagic.com and make phone calls.

We have no one to call except for the Magic Castle to make reservations but it did that with aplomb.  Speaking of which, the desert dish aplomb is not commonly known by most restaurants and not at the Magic Castle.  They asked if we meant “a plumb” — which they did not have anyway — but we corrected them.  They politely said there was no such dish available on their menu and the chef would not be able to “whip one up” as we asked.

Life is now good.  We can post to InsideMagic.com.  We learned how to clean a SIM card.  We found a great take-out menu to a restaurant that serves only desserts  (they have not heard of aplomb either) and we have a newish phone.  It is a flip phone but that’s okay.  It still is able to take and show pictures so we’ll have pertinent artwork to display on the InsideMagic.com site.

All has come together well.

By the way, we bought two different sets of Scotch and Soda.  We like one more than the other but are trying to figure out how to describe the differences without exposing the trick.  Once we do, we’ll share a review here with glossy images from our phone.

That’s the latest.  We hope you didn’t miss us too much.  We definitely missed you.  In the interim, we hope  you checked out our Twitter feed at @insidemagic.  We try to update it several times a day and always magic related content.