That implies it was a saga. It wasn't, but annoyingly, starting on Friday, my cell phone stopped letting me send texts. I'd get a "Message Blocking is active" message instead. (Weirdly, for a brief time on Friday a couple texts still went through, but then, none.)
I called two times on Tuesday to my phone service's customer help line. The first rep did...something on their end, and told me to turn off then turn on the phone and it should be fine. I did. It wasn't. I called again, and the best the next rep and I could figure out was that I should call back on a separate phone to fix my phone.
I put off that call. I got a housemate's permission to use their phone, and I planned to call Wednesday, but I worried that it still wouldn't fix the problem. Here's another factor: my phone, a flip phone (yes, flip phone) from TracFone, is like an Android phone but is...not. Meaning the script a customer service rep uses to tell a customer what to do with their Android phone didn't work with mine, since mine is not an Android phone. If the menu they tell me to go to literally doesn't exist on my phone, what can I do? So I put off the call for a day.
And waited longer today, too. Finally, this afternoon, I got around to it. And did my best to cooperate with the rep. Who finally, without my having to ask, escalated my case to a manager.
And luckily, the problem was entirely on their end. And the fix was on their end. I texted myself, it worked, then I texted a friend, and it worked, then I sent several texts. I could text!
Turns out I've gotten pretty used to texting. As someone who didn't even have a cell phone until 2014 (I got this one on 2018), I've changed. So suddenly inexplicably not having the ability to text made me worried, plus paranoid that maybe people were trying to text me and wondering why I wasn't responding. I wasn't ignoring anybody, promise.
So. A technical hurdle, hurdled. Thank you, TracFone. Next: hurdle my other hurdles...