Cell Phone Hell

This past month I have existed in a state of cell phone hell.

Anyone who has tried to get a hold of me probably has experienced some side-effects of my purgatory; dropped calls, disconnected phone line, fuzziness. I was basically a living, breathing cell phone commercial.

Here's how it all played out.

For the past two years I subscribed to At&t wireless. I was very satisfied with their service. My phone was great, the rates were extremely reasonable (I got a discount by purchasing the plan through a previous intern employer), the online website was easy to navigate, and the coverage was consistent.

The problem that eventually developed was the time that I had to talk changed; I needed to go to bed by 10 so that I did not scream unconditionally at my students and average 3 aneurysms a day. If I was going to bed by 10, that meant I was talking to people from like 8 until 9:30. If I wanted to talk to anybody. Which I did. Because I like people.

So I'm sure you see where this is going. Huge cell phone bills resulted. In March my bill was $180 or so. That was a painful bill, so I resolved to monitor my usage and buckle down and some more cliches about paying attention to stuff and meaning business. I went over in April.

My bill was like $150.

The system was broken. I started researching cell phone companies. My roommate had Verizon. I checked it out. I liked the motorola Q, especially because I wanted to get a smartphone this time around, but the per month fees were really high (he was paying 90 a month or some such nonsense). I just could not justify the jumped from 40 to 90 plus tax.

Then I saw sprint had 7 to 7. It had the Q. It was inexpensive. It was oh so seductive. I overlooked the fact that ever single person said that "Sprint drops calls left and right" and "their coverage sucks". And it dropped calls left and right. It had shoddy coverage. I hated my life. But the final straw was when they made me put a 250$ security deposit down AND would not let me pay with a credit card. I mean, come on. Join the 21st century. I want to pay online. Your service already sucks and inconveniences me to the point I have to go to my car in the parking lot just to carry a normal conversation but then I have to write checks every month?

I started looking at cell phone service again.

Then I found a Motorola Q on bestbuy.com. It was 50$. It was Verizon. Bam. I ordered it. And they proceeded to botch my order in ways that I did not even know were possible. My phone would not activate when it arrived. Then the port did not work. Then the port did work, but Verizon did not have any record of my request for service.

I talked with at least 20 different help desk people, spent 4 hours on the phone and eventually spent 2 hours in bestbuy before the Verizon people got my stuff working again.

I love text messaging.