Cell Phone Fun

I had a cell phone issue today.  It was a simple issue.  The time was off by one hour.  I figured it wasn’t a big problem.  I could just go in and force it to re-sync with the network or manually set the time.

Nice try.

The phone company, in its infinite wisdom, decided to remove those options in their last mandatory update (which occurred flawlessly several weeks ago).  I’ve spent 18 years in IT.  I understand the desire to lock down a system so end users can’t screw it up.  I can't really fault them for removing the controls, but it's still frustrating.

With no user controls I undertook the old standby popularized by Microsoft – reboot, including pulling the battery.

No dice.

Run all the updates and reboot again.

No joy.

At this point I was 90%+ sure that this was a problem with the network and not with my phone.  I braced myself for the inevitable.  Sure enough, my call was answered by the dumbest of the dumb.  I know you can’t take up the time of your most brilliant techs explaining that they can’t recover your phone if you flush it down the toilet (and really who would want it back anyway).  But at some point the poor shmuck who has to listen to stupid users needs to realize when he is providing “support” to someone who has a brain.

After 45 minutes going through all the same inane steps I'd already tried, I was finally paroled from techno-hell and passed on to the next tier of support.  At least this person had some knowledge of how the system works.  She promptly had me enter the codes to do a hands free reactiviation.  Now the phone doesn't work and the phone won't activate because guess what…there’s a problem with the cell network in my area.

Would it really be so hard to train the mindless monkeys on your support team to check if there was a network problem?  Don’t answer that.  You’re right.  That would probably yield as much success as retrieving the cell phone I just flushed down the toilet.