[Tech] 24x7 Digital Age? My ass.

Nerdwife and I have been lusting over the Motorola Razr V3 phones. We currently have Sprint PCS, which means we cannot use those phones as they are GSM (lame, lame, lame). Since we get crappy PCS reception at our new home, I figured switching carriers would not be a bad thing. You have a choice of a few carriers, T-Mobile, Midwest Wireless, and Cingular. I ruled out Midwest Wireless as I want a national carrier that can give me the best deal and the largest coverage with all the bells and whistles of data access (internet) and other such goodness. Some of my co-workers have Cingular and they like it, and most importantly, they get decent reception within the data centers (which Sprint does not). So I did some research and found a place online that had a great (seemingly) deal on Motorola Razrs and Cingular family plan, so I signed up. It was a web form and I put in my existing cell phone numbers and they said they could port them to my new plan, so I thought 'ROCK!'. I signed up, the phones were $180/phone but they had a special offer of $180/phone mail in rebate, so sweeet. I ordered them.

The phones arrived, and flags went off. The rebates where wishy-washy and while giving the $180/phone rebate, they had wierd clauses that were not apparent on the website. Things like we can't submit the rebates less than 180 days but no more than 210 days after activation. There is a $250 equipment fee, plus the $240, plus extra monthly charges to cancel service pending on a variety of situations that were not listed.

So I thought, this all seemed like usual cell phone contract BS, I remember seeing similar in my Verizon and Sprint contracts. So I thought little of it.

The phones had to charge 24 hours before you activate them, so I plugged them in. This was Saturday. Today (Sunday) I called the Cingular number and they are not open on Sundays (which sucks), but they said we could activate phones via their website. So I surfed on over to Cingular's website. More crock-of-shitage. Since our numbers are portable numbers, they do not have them in their system, or perhaps they do not have them in their system yet, so the website wouldn't work. I went to the portability website on Cingular and entered my phone number and zip code. More failure. Now, my cell number has a prefix for the Twin Cities, but my zip code is Rochester, which I know could be an issue, BUT, they are all within Cingular's network, and Sprint gave me no problems when I changed my address to Rochester, since I was in the PCS area.

The local Cingular store is open today so I went to visit them. They told me since I went through the internet, and not them, they could not activate my phone from their store, we could use the phone to call Cingular, but Cingular does not have customer service on Sundays.

Shit-on-a-stick.