[Note: I wrote this a year ago, mainly as therapy for the frustration. I thought it might be interesting for others to see.  Since the event of more than a year ago things have substantially improved and I like my service except for the occaisional quirk.  I’m just glad I don’t have to work through problems every day.  –rlb]

No Service: Painful Portability

The plane lands and turns onto the taxi way.  The flight attendants politely but firmly let you know that you should sit in your seat until the aircraft comes to a complete stop and the pilot turns off the fasten seatbelt sign.  Then she informs you that cellular phones can now be used.

You turn on your phone to the startup tone.  You look down at the signal bar.  No signal.  You try to check your voice mail and receive a message of no service.  You look out the window and confirm you are in a large city.  Looking back down again you realize that this is more than just some added delay in getting the phone to wake up.

The Saga Begins

A situation quite similar happened to me recently.  I landed in Seattle, WA which is just about as far from my home in Indianapolis, IN as you can get without leaving the continental United States.  Although concerned, I felt comfortable that this was just a minor glitch that could be easily resolved.  I made it to the hotel, missing the opportunity to call my wife and let her know that I landed safely before she went to bed.

I picked up the phone at the hotel to call Cingular, the wireless carrier I had switched to only three weeks before hand.  I was greeted with a prompt that told me that customer service was closed, but there was, luckily, an after hours support number.

After a brief interaction, and a technical support person who couldn’t locate the problem I was told to turn the phone off until the morning and things would probably work themselves out.

Broken from the Start

Three weeks prior when trying to activate the service I learned to be somewhat skeptical as I went through a week and a half of trying to get things working.  I ordered the phone from TeleSales and activated service for two lines.  One for my wife and the other to support my needs.  I decided to port my telephone number from Sprint PCS to Cingular in no small part so I could see how bad portability really was.  Sometimes writers have to do things that they know are wrong so they can remind others not to do it – or so I’ve been told by my similarly masochistic friends.

Things were broken from the start as my wife’s phone arrived on time two days after I ordered it but mine was nowhere to be found.  A phone call or two later I was told that the phone hadn’t shipped because they were waiting on the portability department to OK the phone’s shipment.  Over the course of the next few phone calls and countless hours wasted I realized that the process for shipping new service on a ported phone was completely insane since Telesales was waiting on portability.  Portability was waiting on me to have the device so they could activate it in the system.

When two more days passed and I still hadn’t seen the device I called back in only to find out that TeleSales couldn’t track the phone.  However, they were able to finally confirm that the phone shipped – a day after it was supposed to.  By the time the phone arrived it was nearly a full week later.  The device was ordered on a Saturday and arrived the Friday following.  When I called in to activate the phone they couldn’t get the system to take it.  They explained that something was wrong but they’d put in a ticket which might take two business days to get an answer to.

On a whim I called back on Monday and received an activation for the phone.  While on the phone I made a quick outbound call.  Success!  At least that’s what I thought until I went to call the phone back and setup my voicemail.  Neither one of them worked.

Another call back and a few more wasted hours got me no where.  Over the next two days I logged literally hours on the phone trying to get someone who would resolve the problem.  The first day I was told that the phone wasn’t “fully” in the system and that I’d have to wait until Tuesday.  Tuesday came without voice mail or inbound calls.

I finally found a supervisor willing to commit to resolving my issues.  A few hours later I had inbound calls.  A few more calls from me finally got my voice mailbox setup correctly since apparently the device wasn’t setup right before it was shipped and there were some other configuration issues with the phone.

For the time after these problems and before my journey to Seattle all was well.  I was enjoying the extended coverage area and service.

Disaster is in the Air

When the next morning of my Seattle trip came I still had no service.  When I called back in I was told that they couldn’t see the device and would have to put a roaming ticket in and that those took two to three days to resolve.  I was also told that it was most likely an equipment problem and that the phone should be looked at.

Over the next three days I wasted three or so hours trying to get them to identify a store that I could go into to get a resolution.  It seems that the multi-mode (GSM/TDMA) phones that I had weren’t popular in the area so none of the local stores sold them or could diagnose them.  The store which was less than a block from the convention center where I was going to be was useless because they didn’t have the ability to resolve the issue.

I was offered the ability to order a new device from TeleSales – which couldn’t send devices any faster than two day air and I already had experience with them not shipping the same day.  Ultimately this meant that I’d be on my way home before a replacement device could get to me.

The end result was four days in Seattle without the cellular coverage I was paying for.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the whole situation was the fact that there weren’t any quick solutions to the problems I was sharing.  Everything was a two or three day wait.  Every solution was presented with the caveat that it probably wouldn’t fix my problem.

Each solution that I presented was met unceremoniously with a reason why it wouldn’t work.  They couldn’t reprogram the SIM card in my phone because I wasn’t in my home market.  They couldn’t get me a SIM card with a Seattle local number because I didn’t live in Seattle and Indiana and Seattle use different billing systems.

It’s just too bad I can’t live without my cell phone.