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My Phone is New…Kinda

By May 13, 2011herb's eye view

I’d been using the same phone for 5 years now. It’s treated me perfectly right and I have never had any complaints. It was a tiny little flip-phone that I never, ever dropped. It has made an impromptu submerged trip into a swimming pool once and survived. The only reason I made the move to a new phone was because my flip-phone finally ceased to flip. I knew my trusty phone was doomed when I needed both hands to hold it up to my ear.

So, I got one of them nifty smart phones to replace my busted flip-phone. Problem was that my carrier did not offer this particular smart phone and a little bit of jail-breaking was needed in order for me to use it with my current plan. I felt most ethically sound with this decision. If I were to rationalize it, it would sound something like this: “It’s not like I upgraded my phone every year for free”. There.

With my phone plan somewhat non-supportive of my newly acquired smart phone, my brother offered me a spot on his family-plan. This sounded great to me as I crunched a few numbers and realized that I would be spending a little bit less to have more available to me with this service. Sweet! One thing though: my current contract wasn’t up yet and I was unwilling (and will always be unwilling) to pay the breach-of-contract-fee.

I called the customer service line to determine when my contract would be up. But, I didn’t want it to sound like I was straight up thinking of leaving. So I asked the gentleman on the other side of the phone when I would be going month-to-month with my billing. He says,

“Why, in a couple of months. Are you thinking of leaving?”

“Uh…uh…” I stutter.

“We can upgrade you to 400 more whenever minutes for free if you’d like to sign up for another 2 years.”

“Well…cool…but I just wanted to find out when…”

“I see you’re rocking the iPhone 3G. We could add data to your plan for a small fee.”

Whoa! You pulled up what kinda phone I’m using even though you don’t offer it and I had to jail-break it to use it and I never told you what kinda phone I had and all I wanted to know was when I could quit your service and I was trying to be polite and sneaky and you are making me feel like you are trying to call me out on something and you are doing a pretty good job of it? Whoa! You are wiggin’ me out, customer service dude!

“I was just kinda checkin’ things out” I say.

“Oh, you’re just figuring out your options. Well, I’ll just put you down here as ‘declined'”

“I just wanted to know….”

“I won’t waste any more of your time, Herb. Have a nice day!”

*dial tone*

Ouch!

herb

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