del.icio.us
(5/13)

It's a beautiful Saturday, Barry Bonds is still trying to hit #715, birds are chirping and all that crap...

And here I am back on the phone this time with T-Mobile directly. I speak with customer service, tech. support, provisioning, the data department and a whole circus of T-Mobile drones (to be fair, they're nice on the phone, it's just that they can't _help_).

One of the guys "rebuilds" my account and again, I'm calling from within the home and the MDA shows the dots. There are sporadic moments where I'd receive a text message, you'd see the "G" and get a bar or two. Then when you make a call, it dies into a cell-phone ether. Obviously something's wrong...

Finally the guy at the PDA department, after having me again reboot the MDA for the umpteenth time and even flush out memory and start from scratch, swap sim chips between phones, etc.. (we did this for both MDAs), came to the conclusion that the sim chip was bad and told me to take it to the corporate store to see what's going on.

And off we go to the store.

After explaining the situation to the guy at the store, he takes my chip out, puts in one of his, starts the MDA and poof! 4 bars. Of course he then says it's a bad chip and that he wants $20 for a new chip. What? Fuggetabatit. He then proceeds to tell me that he's experienced people returning the MDA on the spot after making the purchase due to "reception issues".

Our course of action at this point is to call up Letstalk and get new sims. Now, when I leave the store, I play around with the phone some more and realized that maybe it's not the chip so I had the guy put my chip into one of his phones. No problems. Now this is getting ridiculous but I take T-Mobile's advice and decide to get a new sim chip...


Elapsed time: 3 hours

If you make minimum wage ($8.50/hour) = $25.50
If you're a hot-shot partner at a law-firm ($400/hour) = $1200 (crazy, right?)

Overall satisfaction meter: :\