AT&T Frustration

Over my Bloomington/Cinci trip, I noticed that my cell phone's screen had started intermittently blinking, perhaps once every ten seconds or so. Fortunately, I recognized this as a potential sign of my phone's death, and I saved all of my contacts to my SIM card. Well today, the phone finally started truly crapping out: more often than not, when I opened the phone the screen would be totally blanked out.

So, I headed over to my local AT&T store to see what options I had for fixing the phone. Since I had had the phone for over a year now, my warrantee had run out, so the only option left was to buy a new phone. Unfortunately, this meant jumping through a bunch of hoops, including having to get my Dad (under whose name our family's joint account existed) to call customer service to give me clearance to alter the account by putting my new phone on it. To complicate matters, my Dad had exchanged phones with my uncle Tim today, making for a couple strange/complicated conversations.

Once we got this sorted out though, I thought I would be in the clear, but then the service guy at the store proceeded to put me on hold by taking about 30 minutes to explain to some woman how to use her new phone he just sold her. After being in the store for over an hour, I was about ready to leave and go to another store, but the guy finally got around to helping me. As it turns out, there was only one phone I could choose which wouldn't force me into canceling my current plan and signing a new one, and that phone was somehow a downgrade from my previous bottom-rung phone (believe it or not, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a volume control!). Ugh.