Friday, December 30, 2005

Captain’s Log Supplemental – Still no Phone

So I went to the store for a new SIMM. The person I dealt with at the store seemed completely confused. She did give me a new SIMM and warned me not to turn the phone on until I called to activate it, because I didn’t want to “burn out the SIMM”…whatever that means.

So by the time I got home and got Loren settled, it was noon when I called to activate my phone. This was now my third call to activate my phone. Now, after I put all my data into the automated system, it told me:

“We are unable to find your account based on the information you provided. Press 1 to re-enter your information or 0 to speak with a customer service representative.”

So I pressed 1 and put in my cell number and my billing zip again and got the same message. So I moved on to an actual person.

A 25 minute conversation later (with lots of holding while the rep "rebooted his system"), I was told to turn on my phone but that it would take 2 hours for my activation to “move through the switch”…whatever that means. The rep promised to call me back at 4 PM my time (which is 3.5 hours after I turned on the phone) to see if I had service.

He also told me it “might be quicker than 2 hours” and that once I got service I needed to “turn the phone off and then back on”.

So here I am, 18 hours after I first turned on my phone so it would “auto-activate”, and I am still without service.

Why is Cingular still in business? Is it because everyone is locked into 2-year contracts that they cannot get out of? I am considering looking into what would be involved in a class-action lawsuit against all the mobile phone companies to eliminate this practice of long contracts with expensive buy-out options. I’m sure I could find an attorney in NYC who would want to take this on. The price of the phones will go up, but maybe the f****** companies would treat their customers better if every single one of them could jump ship at any time.

2 comments:

Ryan said...

Your screwed....this is the same problem I have been trying to get them to fix for a month now.

Curt Sawyer said...

We cannot be the first AT&T customers to try and migrate to Cingular. If it was going to be this fucking hard, Cingular should have just fucked us all from the start and as soon as they bought AT&T cancelled all our accounts so we could go to another carrier.