the everyday adventures of sabrina

woke up this morning to continued lack of cell phone service. alas, poor phone sitting at the bottom of niqui’s laptop bag, passing time thinking forlornly on its late, lamented network authorization. niqui is, naturally, sitting on hold with cingular. again. b., the agent at the cingular store who offered to call me friday, never did, so i am trying to ascertain my migration eligibility on my own. i tell you, explaining the whole situation just never gets old.

currently, i am on hold listening to the obligatory awful hold music while a recording of a too-perky woman alternates every thirty seconds or so between asking me to use good judgment while phoning and driving, or to switch to online automatic bill payments. whoever manages this call center clearly has never been forced to spend significant amounts of time listening to their hold music/reminders because if they had, they would realize why i really could not give a shit about their automatic 411 service offering to text-message me numbers so i can have them later, especially after being told about the service approximately 300 times.

* niqui sings a little song. “on the phone again, i just can’t wait to get on the phone again, the life i love is using a cellular phone, and i can’t wait to get on the phone again!”
<niqui> obviously /me is full of lies, but…
<niqui> nonetheless i’ve begun today’s exercise in frustration trying to get my cingular issue resolved
<wasy> niqui is remarkably persistent
* niqui is painfully stupid.

in response to folks asking why i don’t just change providers: i would, except i’m pretty sure you can’t transfer a cancelled number to another provider — you’d have to have an active phone to transfer it. in order to get uncancelled, i’m going to have to get a new phone. in order to get a new phone, i’m going to be forced to get a new two-year contract, because i can’t afford the inflated prices of a contract-free phone, even if i did get the awful $30-with-contract low-end model. quel scam!

…

woo! only 45 minutes on the phone today. the nice Customer Service Agent Number Six found out that no, i was still not eligible for migration — thanks, Customer Service Agent Number Five from Thursday, not that i really expected anything different — so she called over to billing and collections and got them to push it through. (or so she said. who knows if they actually did. remember, they don’t love me anymore because i didn’t give them the $169 i didn’t owe them.) then i threw caution to the winds and pleaded with the agent to see if maybe, by any chance, perhaps, somehow, some way they still had a stash of old ATTWS sim cards that would work in my phone, so i wouldn’t have to upgrade, since i love my old phone (i do! the t68i is the best phone i’ve ever had. besides, i have a bunch of accessories for it. and, okay, yeah, i’ve been planning to replace it because the ‘Yes’ button’s broken, but i would really appreciate the opportunity to upgrade on my own terms, when i am not faced between buying it and, say, paying my renter’s insurance premium. but i digress.). she put me on hold and went off to find out. … and it turns out that yes!, they can replace my sim card, despite being told no, no, no, a thousand times no by every previous customer service agent. well, what the hell. if they send me a cingular SIM card that won’t work in my ATTWS phone, at least i’m no worse off than i am now. so, i spring the extra five bucks for expedited shipping (which probably won’t really matter since i won’t be home for fedex/ups/whoever to deliver to, but … what the hell, it’s worth a shot), and she didn’t even mention until much later that there was a replacement card fee at all (because she waived it for me without even having to ask). anything else she can do for me today? nope; thank you for calling, have a nice day. so, five minutes after i get off the phone, i try to turn on my phone, just out of “what the hell.” guess what? despite the hardcore cinnamon fragrance now permanently imbued in the plastic from sitting for so long in the laptop bag pocket where i keep gum, …

IT WORKS! i can call people! they can call me! i can even receive text messages! OH FRABJOUS DAY! and, no, cingular, don’t worry, i won’t let my phone distract me from driving safely. so, just to recap this for my own entertainment:

• i had no phone service for two and a half weeks. still have no idea why (my personal assumption is that when ATT consolidated the bill into my home phone bill, they “discovered” the “delinquent” account-that-never-was, which prompted them to cut off my real phone — but no one has been able to actually tell me what happened.);
• i probably have a complaint on my credit rating now (oh goodie!) for the account they sent to collections after they failed to realize that i had cancelled it;
• i was told repeatedly that i had no, no, absolutely no choice but to purchase new equipment;
• i actually did purchase a replacement sim card, which it turns out i don’t appear to need;
• i was sent off to cingular stores twice because everything was straightened out, when it wasn’t, and so got to enjoy north side rush hour driving i would normally have stayed far, far away from;
• i wasted 90 minutes standing around in stores while store sales agents sat on hold with Cingular Ground Command trying to figure out if they could sell me a phone or not;
• i invested three and three-quarters hours on the phone; and
• i talked directly to six ATT and cingular customer service agents in my various phone stints, and they interacted with several others during the course of researching my problem.

… and in the end, all they had to do was to cancel the bogus account and push the approval to reinstate service through their systems and my phone just started working fine again.

(in defense of the customer service agents, despite their cluelessness on the “you must upgrade phones!” issues, each one of them was very friendly and genuinely seemed invested in getting me working again, and it was easy to work with all of them without even getting grumpy despite the complete ridiculousness of the situation. i actually blame ATT-the-entity, as a corporate amorphous bureaucratic blob which can’t get its act together from acquiring ten billion business units and squashing them together, for not giving them adequate training or the resources to actually get my problem figured out in a timely manner. in short, ATT *deserves* the phone bill they’re gonna get from paying for me to sit on their 800 number for hours! …oh, wait. damn.) (and, i wonder what i should do with my spare sim card once it arrives?)

so, two weeks ago, my cell phone stopped working.

approximate timeline:

• july, 2000: i get a new cell phone, from at&t wireless, since i’m dissatisfied with cellular one cingular.
• may, 2003: upgrade from my crappy nokia to my sony-ericsson t68i, which i love, love, love.
• 2004 sometime: cingular buys at&t wireless. of course. i sulk, but keep the service because i still like the phone and don’t want to change my number.
• july, 2005: i decide to upgrade my phone before leaving on my road trip, because my beloved t68i is getting a little beat up. despite going in to the store and listing as my priorities “bluetooth ppp capabilities, size, and keypad that doesn’t suck,” the guy sells me a phone without bluetooth, which i discover about ten minutes after walking out of the store, while playing with the menus in line in a different store in the same strip mall. i immediately return the phone, with an obligatory 24-48 hour wait for service to be restored to the old phone.
• july, 2005: apparently cingular “forget” that they credited my account for the phone i returned — which had necessitated an entirely new cingular account, because it was a “real” cingular phone instead of an inherited at&t wireless phone — and promptly start billing me for an account for the phone that i returned. except they don’t actually get around to the “bill me” part. apparently they finally sent it off to collections for non-payment, which would probably have been nice to have known about. the account is “written off,” which is a technical term that apparently means “at some undetermined point in the future we will screw this customer over in return for them not paying us the $169.61 we gave them back.”
• march, 2006: i call ameritech sbc at&t to arrange to move my landline phone service from my old apartment to my new one. while i’m at it, i decide to take them up on their offer to consolidate my cingular wireless bill into my at&t phone bill (and thus the acquisition renaming “what company were you a customer of?” nightmare comes full circle). this was a mistake, as it apparently gave them an excuse to mess with me.
• early june, 2006: i go to clear my text messages *again* after my memory fills up *again* because of this one really whiny server at work that’s been paging us every four hours for like three months now, and the phone display no longer says AT&T Wireless or any other carrier name, but instead reads SIM ERROR. rebooting it has no effect, and it refuses to talk to the network.
• last week: spend 90 minutes on the phone with at&t, going through four different departments and four different customer service agents in order to make sense of the mess. agent number three claims that my cell phone was cancelled because i forgot to pay my bill, except i had paid my phone bill earlier that day. agent four said that they would note on my account that the bill was paid and send my account off for reactivation, which would take 24-48 hours. that was on thursday.
• monday, tuesday, wednesday: my phone is still broken, but so is my spirit. cannot cope with another hour and a half on the phone with people who thank me for being an AT&T customer, as though i had a choice in the matter or were, say, receiving actual service from them.
• today: suck in my gut and pick up the phone, out of desperation to get my phone back before they give my number out to someone else. listen, it took me like five years to get everyone in my family accustomed to calling that number, and i am not going through that again even if it is a stupid 847 number and i haven’t lived in 847 in like five years. spend another 85 minutes on the phone, only two agents this time, and the second one, gary, brings up the written off account from the bollixed upgrade last summer as the source of the trouble. apparently i’m a bad customer and they don’t love me anymore, and that’s why they are refusing to reinstate service. (though note that i still don’t have a clear answer as to why the phone was actually cancelled in the first place.) gary reverses part of the charge and credits me the rest (huh? oh, fuck it; whatever), and tells me that i’m going to have to get a new sim card to get back online. (what? my old sim card worked fine until YOU CANCELLED ME FOR NO REASON.) okay, whatever. i just want my phone back. he looks up a local cingular store in my zip code, calls over there and tells one of the sales guys what to do to get me back, gives me the guy’s name and the store’s hours. i manage to squeak over to the store twenty minutes before their seven o’clock closing time, and find my sales guy. he then spends twenty minutes on the phone with the mothership, only to learn that (a) i am going to be forced to upgrade my phone, because since it’s an ATTWS phone and not a cingular phone no one will have a sim card that works in it, and, (b) furthermore, he can’t do it at his shop because they’re only an “authorized dealer” and not an actual cingular store (although the big sign says cingular and there’s bloody enough orange decor to blind you), so he calls up the next cingular store up the road and sends me over there to get set up. i make it to the next cingular store with fortunately about 40 minutes to spare before they close, and find my designated sales guy, who has been briefed about The Situation. he tinkers and says i’m going to have to buy a phone. never mind that i can’t afford to buy a new phone at the minute, what the hell ever, i just want to get a phone and get it working and get the hell out of dodge. i pick out a razr —
  

  <wasy> niqui should get the pink one!
  <wasy> PINK!
  <wasy> PINK PHONE!
  * niqui looks ashamed.
  * niqui … was planning on it.
  <wasy> ha!
  <niqui> they only had one left, so they put it aside for me.
  <niqui> shut up.
  <wasy> PINK PHONE!
  <niqui> dude, if i’m gonna be forced to get a new phone, i’m going to get the one that amuses me

  — despite the cost being nearly twice what i wanted to pay for my forced upgrade. we retreat to the sales desk so that he can hook me up. only,
    there’s
      just
        one
          more
            problem:
  the credit for the written off account that cingular forgot i returned — TO THIS EXACT CINGULAR STORE! — has not been processed enough, and so i am still ineligible for a migration, i.e. to get a working phone. dude offers to check the system as soon as he gets in to work tomorrow afternoon, and give me a call when he knows if i should come in to get my new phone, or if i should just not bother yet.

so. i still don’t have a working phone. i don’t even know why my phone stopped working. i’ve put three hours in on the phone, gone through half a dozen customer service agents, another several in person, about ten miles of extra driving in rush hour traffic (so let’s say that was about an hour and probably a gallon of gas). i’m going to have to go back, so there’s an extra half hour of driving (at least it’ll only be to one store). i’m being forced to buy a new phone, which, okay, i could have gotten the awful low-end model for $30 after rebate and instead i picked out a nicer one for $130 after rebate, but still, an expense i wasn’t planning for — despite the fact that i was still more or less happy with my old phone. and i still don’t know when my damned phone will be back on!

i have been completely pwned by ma bell. this is just sad.