The f*cking cold is back again, damnit. This bipolar weather shit is getting pretty annoying. Good thing I don’t have to go out today, but it’s not gonna get any better for the rest of the week, so I’ll have to leave the house tomorrow. It’s currently about four below and it’s supposed to get colder before it gets warmer today. If you can consider a high of seven “warmer,” that is. Oh well, at least I’m not in Big Form Minnesota, where according to The Weather Channel, it’s -29° at the moment. Now that’s cold.

So I need a little help from you Apple fanboys and fangirls out there. I don’t really get a whole lot of phone calls on my work iPhone, but I do get three kinds in general. First, in order to log into my work VPN, I have to go to a web page and authenticate. If I do that successfully, an automated system calls the phone I have on record and then tells me to push a certain key. The second kind of call I get is that when somebody calls my desk at work and leaves voicemail, the system calls my cell phone every 15 minutes and gives me the opportunity to push the pound sign and enter my password to pick up the message. The alternative to that is calling the office (not cell phone) voicemail system (the number for which I can never remember) and then jumping through a bunch of hoops to get to my mailbox and enter all my secret codes. The third (and least frequent) type of call I get (not calling Ann from Credit Card Services, of course) is somebody from work who wants to talk to me (frankly, I prefer Ann).

That all seems simple enough, and with a “regular” phone, it would be. But with the freakin’ iPhone, I have to swipe to answer (so far so good, though it’s a tad on the slow side) and then it goes to a screen where I have to touch the “keypad” icon, and then the keypad screen comes up after a bit of a hesitation. And all the while I can hear the automated voice droning on about what key to touch or whatever. In the case of the VPN authentication, I know what’s coming and I know what key it is and it gives me a few seconds to hit it before it hangs up on me.

In the case of the voicemail system, the generic main number for where I work displays, so I don’t actually know if it’s the voicemail system or somebody from work is actually calling me. So I have to answer and then I either have to hit the speaker phone icon or put the phone up to my ear to say hello (unless I happen to have my ear thingie in, which I usually don’t ‘cuz I have enough problems w/o getting brain cancer), only to find out that it’s the voicemail system. And it is then really friggin’ hard to hit the buttons fast enough to get to the voicemail before the damn thing hangs up on me.

So what I’d really like is to set the default on-answer phone screen to the keypad. I would think that would be simple – especially since Apple is so well known for being so user-friendly and all that (assuming you do things the way they want you to). And maybe it is simple, and I’m just too dumb to figure it out. I’ve looked at all the settings (I think), I’ve Googled, and I even tried asking Siri (who is either a friggin’ moron or just deliberately obstinate and obtuse. She gets kinda touch when you compare her to Scarlett Johansson, too).

So, if y’all know how to set the default phone screen on one of these infernal contraptions, I would most certainly be obliged.

Thanks, and stay warm out there.