Leaving T-Mobile

Years ago at col­lege I wrote a very vivid, polit­i­cally incor­rect, and extremely explicit blog post entail­ing my frus­tra­tion at an ordeal Com­cast had put me through con­cern­ing pay-per-view charges which kept appear­ing on our account for no reason.

Today I’m not going to do that to T-Mobile, though I am beyond frus­trated, beyond angry, beyond belief that T-Mobile is act­ing this way. They’re rated the top cell phone car­rier for cus­tomer ser­vice and yet I’m fac­ing the third dead phone of theirs in just 5 months.

Now this isn’t like I dropped it and broke the screen dead. This is dead as in the soft­ware lit­er­ally crashed in front of me and has left me with a 6oz brick in my pocket. All it does is pro­vide a white screen when pow­ered on. I’ve removed the bat­tery, done a hard reboot. Tried any­thing I could think of and last night when I called their tech sup­port, expect­ing them to make this right, all I got was a very apolo­getic girl on the phone and a super­vi­sor who could only either replace the phone with another of the same model, or give me a dis­counted upgrade to a new phone.

Why? Because I’ve only been with the com­pany for five months.

And you know what? That’s more than long enough for me.

After the sec­ond dead phone I was ready to leave and I even went to a Ver­i­zon store but decided to give T-Mobile one more shot. I wanted to believe that they weren’t going to do this to me again. Unfor­tu­nately it seems I was wrong.

Trick me once, shame on you.

Trick me twice, shame on me.

Trick me thrice, and we’re not going to be on good terms.

I’m going to be email­ing the cor­po­rate stooges, who­ever I can find, to get them to con­tact me. I’m going to be email­ing my story to any con­sumer inter­est blog I can find, Con­sumerist of course being at the top of the heap.

Here’s what T-Mobile can do: either give me a new, upgraded phone for free, because this cur­rent phone broke through no fault of my own and obvi­ously this model has issues, or let me out of my con­tract free of charge because they’ve breached it and failed to pro­vide me with ser­vices which are laid out in their con­tract. This is the cross­roads we’re at. I’m not going to be a sheep, I’m not going to kow-tow to T-Mobile, con­sumers have the power.

Time for me to get to work, but believe me, this story isn’t over yet.