More Cellular Hell

If there is a hell, it has cell phones. No doubt the only form of communication in hell is wireless. And your wireless service (so they call it) in hell comes complete with crappy coverage, apathetic customer service agents, and idiotic support technicians who didn’t pass Dialing 101.

I never wanted a cell phone. Who wants to be THAT accessible, anyway? I mean, people think that having a mobile number gives everyone and their brother carte blanch to phone you anytime anywhere. Usually during dinner. The funny thing is, they really expect you’ll answer while standing in line at the Rite Aid. After all, you have a cell phone.

That is exactly why I held out for years. I hate the sound of a ringing phone – which probably comes from 5 or 6 years of, “Thank you for calling Domino’s Pizza, this is Susie, may I take your order please?” Not to mention, I’m a woman. I already have enough stuff to carry in my purse.

So, thanks to my recentl job transfer, I now have a cell phone. Two, actually – one for each ulcer I was diagnosed with earlier today.

It took me seven months of cell phone hell to get at least one phone that worked and had the features I needed for my job. My most basic need was a phone that I could synchronize with the Microsoft Outlook Contacts stored on my laptop. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? Heck, I don’t even care any more about getting email on my cell phone. I just refuse to type in 305 different contact names and their multiple contact numbers using a miniature phone keypad as a keyboard. No way in hell was I gonna do that. (Although this likely is the preferred method in hell.)

So I had this smart phone that could do all that. An AudioVox 5600 and AT&T Wireless/Cingular service. My first cell phone. It was pretty cool except for the lame “joystick” functionality that, 9 times out of 10, didn’t work as expected, making navigation on the tiny screen a frustrating experience. But this phone had it all – including PC synchronization. Contacts on my laptop would automatically update on the phone. I received my work email on the phone too, as well as reminders for my calendar appointments. Pretty slick. Too bad I didn’t have coverage in my home office. A major requirement unfulfilled.

Four months of fighting with Cingular over the lack of coverage took up way too much time. A couple weeks ago, they finally made a deal with me just to shut me up. Alas, I won the battle in the end, right after I told my boss I’d given up the fight. My one last-ditch effort to get out of the remaining 5.5 months in the contract paid off, allowing me to port my number over to a different carrier – thus saving my 100+ customers the inconvenience of changing my number in their Contacts.

So I ordered two new phones fromT-Mobile. That was May 2. The work phone was supposed to work with my Outlook corporate email. But it didn’t. By May 12 I had spent between 30-40 hours on the phone with T-Mobile “Customer Care,” researching the issue on my own, testing various email configurations, and exchanging email with my employer’s T-Mobile rep. I took copious notes throughout the time-wasting experience. Over the course of ten days I spoke to a total of 22 different people, 21 of which told me that my email should work but who also failed at configuring it. Most of them were pretty nice – but were either under-trained or at least a couple beers short of a six-pack.

Some promised results by selling me more and more expensive data services – (after putting me on the wrong data plan to begin with and then telling me I’d have to wait for “up to” 72 hours for the new data plan to kick and jump-start my email). Almost all of them transferred me from one person to another at T-Mobile. Some transferred me to Motorola tech support. Motorola tried to sell me a “mobile phone tools” kit that I eventually found out through my own research on their Web site a few days later isn’t even supported on the phone model I had. All in all, each and every one of them made me promises that they didn’t keep.

And only two were worth filing complaints over. Get this - one gal refused to troubleshoot my problem unless I gave her my corporate domain password. Huh?! Like I’m going to give some idiot technician access to Windows source code. I think not. She said she couldn’t troubleshoot my email failure if she “couldn’t see the same screens” I was seeing. I suggested that I walk through the setup and read the error messages to her. Nope – she’d have nothing to do with that. I tried to explain to her how giving my email password to her was a security issue, but she really didn’t get it. Her response was, “I won’t remember it; half the time I can’t remember my own passwords.” Wow. She must’ve failed Security 101, right after getting a D in Introduction to Troubleshooting.

Later in the tech support call from hell she told me that if I wanted a phone that supported email, I should’ve bought a PDA, not a phone. Huh?! “But look it says right here on t-mobile.com that Exchange corporate email and Lotus Notes works with this phone.” So she quickly decided it was my IT department’s fault that the phone wasn’t working, and I should call them instead. And boy, she latched on to that excuse. Her reasoning? “Because I couldn’t get my email set up on my phone until I called my IT department.”

When I asked her to escalate my call, she told me that she was the highest level of tech support I could get. Oh god. This company is in real trouble, I thought. She refused to give me her full name and finally, after 30 minutes of this argumentative behavior, I said ever-so-firmly, “I need to speak to someone more technical than you.” So she transferred me to a non-technical supervisor (who, by the way, also couldn’t help me with my email issue). One thing I made sure of was that Ms. Bitchy Support got reprimanded in the end. It pays to take copious notes.

In the end, my company’s T-Mobile rep finally determined (just yesterday) that corporate email doesn’t work on my fancy new Motorola A630 and that all their advertising to that effect is incorrect – oh, and that they’d be sure to fix that on their Web site and inform their sales people to stop promoting the phone that way.

I gotta admit, the phone reception in my apartment was crystal clear on those new T-Mobile phones, so I wasn’t ready to give up on T-Mobile just yet. I did spend time with my company’s idiotic Sprint and Verizon reps, neither of whom could tell me after four days of research exactly which phones they sold would support PC synch. I’d have to find another solution.

After countless hours of research of my own – you gotta love phonescoop.com - I found two Samsung phones that supported PC synch and were sold at a huge discount by T-Mobile on a 1-year contract. (I’ve got to say, T-Mobile prices beat Verizon and Sprint all to hell. Which means that cell phones in hell are probably sold by only those two carriers – or Cingular if you want no coverage at all in hell.)

My two new phones arrived today. So far, so good on the reception end. As far as downloading my 300+ Contacts to the phone – well, we’ll see if that works after the optional $60 “connectivity kit” I had to order online arrives in the mail. T-Mobile doesn’t sell the kit – probably because they don’t support it.

I’m not holding my breath.