I finally went to Cingular today to get a new phone– I suppose I could have just gotten a new battery, but for some reason the quality of service had declined dramatically as well. The phone would work for 12 or 24 or 36 hours, then would require a hard reset. Even a hard reset didn’t correct the bug which told me I had voicemail all the time, regardless of whether I had any. Obviously, the solution to a decline in service quality was the purchase of new hardware.
After I selected a phone, it took me almost an hour to get out of the store. First, I was informed that I could not buy just one new phone: I had to buy two. See, I was an AT&T customer before Cingular bought AT&T, and my girlfriend and I have a joint account. Because the AT&T/Cingular billing systems are still separate, you can’t have an AT&T phone and a Cingular phone on the same account. So, both phones had to be upgraded because one was misbehaving.
Of course, now that I’m renewing my contract, I no longer get the discount I did when I worked for Novell. Total cost to address poor service on the part of Cingular: $126, plus locking myself into a new contract for two years– a contract which is now more expensive every month. And of course, since we’re switching from AT&T to Cingular, we get new SIM cards, meaning we have to re-enter all the data in our address books. Joy.
After forty-five minutes or so in the store, just as escape seemed imminent, the billing system refused to accept my address, and demanded a new one. The cashier called the internal Cingular helpdesk, and left the speakerphone on while she battled through the prompt system and spent a few minutes on hold. Then, just as the helpdesk answered, the system myseriously worked.
By this point, we were both laughing. She said “Gawd, this billing system sucks… but it’s not as bad as the one we had when we were AT&T: Siebel. That was terrible.”
I was glad to see that I was not the only person in the world who thinks that Siebel is a punchline, rather than a legitimate product. Not glad enough to make me stop resenting my phone company, but I smiled a little.
Secretly Ironic 