Maybe I should post… & Cingular Sucks
Or maybe not.
Eh, what the heck. My new job is going very well, but I sure do miss my development box. Otis, my dual P3 BeOS / game box is still in Mississippi. I’m -seriously- considering calling up a friend in MS and seeing if I could get him to ship it up here. I miss it so.
I do have an R5 box up here now though. My cousins old 233MHz Pentium with a whopping 32MB of RAM. It’s an old Packard Bell (yes, I prefer to use the old nickname, but I’ve censored myself) piece of junk. But it works. After hacking the bootscript and not starting any unnecessary servers, I can get ~8MB of RAM free after startup. With StyledEdit, a Terminal, and BeIDE open I still manage about 4MB of RAM free. When you hit that RAM limit, it starts paging like a druggie looking for his pusher.
So I’ve started on a small (well, small to start) project on R5 – a continuation / rewrite of one that I attempted about this time last year. The big difference is, this time I’m going about it the right way. I’m hacking the core functionality first. Duh. I should have done that last time.
Warning: Cell phone provider rant ahead!
Cingular is just as bad as any other cell phone company. They’re just more responsive when they do blow it. I moved from Jackson, MS to Indianapolis, IN at the beginning of the month. I needed a new phone number that’s local to this area. This means I have to go to a Cingular store, request a new number, etc. They’ll give you a new smart card (since it’s a GSM phone) and renew your contract for it’s initial length, you’ll walk out the door with a new number. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
I logged into my account on-line yesterday to check and make sure everything was fine. It wasn’t. They were charging me $120 in termination fees! What!? I didn’t terminate anything. This was customer support call #1. After talking through this with the nice, helpful lady on the other end of the phone, she took the case to a manager and they removed the charge. I was happy, and that was it. Then I went back and poked around some more.
I was looking at the new phones they have and when I’d be eligible for a subsidised upgrade. It should be July of 06 that I’m eligible. They were showing January 07. What? So I started poking around some more, and that’s when I found out that they “renewed” my 1 year contract and magically turned it into a 2 year contract. BULL! I cried. Customer support call #2.
The nice lady on the other end of the phone looked at it, confirmed that I had a 1 year contract initially and that it had somehow turned into a 2 year contract. At that point I demanded that they change the contract to a 1 year contract and that it’s starting date of the new 1 year contract be 8/2/05, the day they screwed all this up to begin with. She gave me some run around, so I then demanded that they at least refund me the $135 dollars in additional subsidy that I didn’t get for only signing a 1 year contract to begin with when I got the phone. More run around, and then she went to talk to a manager.
She came back and said she could give me a 1 year contract starting today. I confirmed that I would accept a 1 year contract, but that it had to start on 8/02/05, not 8/17/05. She tried to pass off “it’s only two weeks….” to which I replied, “Yes, it is only a couple weeks, practically speaking it’s not a big deal. On a principal level, it’s entirely unethical. You’re trying to lock me into a contract to which I never agreed, and trying to get two more weeks out of it than you should have. That’s two weeks of additional revenue that your company is by no means entitled to. You’re ripping me off, and it’s wrong. I won’t take it.” More run-around.
Legally, I wasn’t the one who broke the contract. I read my contract. I knew I wasn’t bound to the two year agreement. I’d rather settle this peacefully and have my 1 year contract extended (and thereby restart as of 8/2/05) like it said should happen in my contract. I wasn’t out to get ahead. I just wanted what I agreed to when I signed up, and what was fair. This whole “we can start your 1 year contract today” isn’t even remotely fair.
“You can either figure out how to start my 1 year contract on 8/2/05, or you can put me on the phone with your manager so I can cancel my service and inform them that I’ll be calling a lawyer and filing a charge of breech of contract, Cingular being the party that broke the contract when they extended a 1 year contract for two years starting on 8/2/05.”
Lo and behold it got fixed within 10 seconds.
Is it just me, or are all cell phone companies incompetent shysters that’ll screw over consumers any chance you give them and hope you don’t notice? There should be a consumer protection law that forbids them to even give people a hassle (run around) on anything like this. Personally, after their total flub-up I feel like I should be able to cancel my contract and retain service without contract.
They’re still a few levels of decency above Sprint in my book, but they’re trying to go lower.
August 18th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
Theres a hugely quick way around the issue of needing to move the cellphone number – non-geographic cellphone numbers.
My provider has 085-xxx xxxx to issue, another provider here has 087, another 086 and another 083 – no matter where you go in the country, your number makes sense because its not geographically tied.
August 18th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
We have this thing called “long distance” here. Oh, that’s right, our country is bigger than the size of Indiana.
August 18th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
In response to Bryan’s response:
ROFLMAO yes, MYOB lives in a MUCH smaller area :)
There’s two sides to the long distance number issue that I expect MYOB is unaware of:
1. It can cost (depending on the plan) more for the phone service owner to call out.
2. In cases where they don’t have unlimited long distance plans (they still exist here) it would ALWAYS cost the person a long distance charge to call such a number, even if they are 10 feet away.
3. And then there’s the issue of roaming charges, and that the cell phone user may find themselves in a perpetual roaming charge situation if a local number isn’t acquired: this is invariably more expensive than merely a long distance phone number.
It pays to understand how the local infrastructure actually *works* before suggesting that there’s clearly a better solution that applies to a different locale.