that much<\/em>). The inventive sales person wasn’t there. And, I guess, that was six years ago.<\/p>\nWe went to a different franchised store from the same local brand. The store in Republic was two young ladies watching very carefully a wasp that came into the store. Even with actual customers in the store, they were more focused on the wasp. So I took the broom that the senior person was holding and smashed both the wasp and the broom, and we got some attention.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the young lady to whom we were assigned was not very good at her job. My wife tried to explain that we hoped for free phone upgrades in exchange for signing up for a couple of years, but her phrasing was that she didn’t want the bill to go up, which the young woman could not parse because our phone payments would make the bill go up. So we left rather brusquely, vowing to transfer to another carrier.<\/p>\n
So we made our way into Springfield and hit the store of a different carrier. We stood in the foyer for a couple of minutes until someone told a senior customer experience specialist with a tablet to check us in. Then we sat for twenty minutes with little movement ahead of us until a salesperson shook loose. He sat down, listened to what we were looking for, and offered us a deal with new phones with a contract about what we were paying. When we said, “Thanks, but we’re going to check out other things,” he offered us a 20% reduction if we signed right now. Don’t blame Lily; it wasn’t her carrier, and she’s not a Motivated salesperson.<\/p>\n
So we went to a corporate store of our current carrier–whose coverage includes Nogglestead, which is not<\/em> a given even now, and a salesman was ready for us when we came in the door. We told him that the other carrier offered us free phones and a monthly price like our current rate. He said he would not be able to do it, but, son of a gun, Scotty got the engines working, and we got new iPhones 17s for those of us who did not lose their phones and an iPhone 16 for the one of us who has been using a monthly paid flip phone for three months. The plan is basically the same, although they did bump the plan of the oldest into parity–apparently, when the young man was punished in high school for abusing his phone privileges and got a flip phone for emergencies, his plan got downgraded but did not get re-upgraded when he was done being grounded. Which meant we were underpaying for years. Do I feel like I was stealing from the company? No: We did not do it on purpose.<\/p>\nIt still took a long time to get through all the screens and scanning of ESIMs and whatnot. In the old days, they’d set up the phones there and transfer your data, but now they send you home to do it, and….<\/p>\n
Well, Pop Pop here is getting old, and I did not relish the opportunity.<\/p>\n
So I started the setup, and set it for near-field transmission, and went about doing something else, and when I looked at the phone, it had an error message on it indicating I had to call a toll-free number to set up my new phone number. But I was not getting a new phone number–the son who lost his phone was. I presumed it was configured for the wrong slot on the account. I backed out of the message, but then was unable to proceed. The phone tree was unhelpful; it wanted to know for what phone number I was setting up the phone, and the error message had only shown the last four digits. I tried looking up my account via account number, but apparently I am not a customer–or I have been a customer so long (my wife has been with this carrier for 30 years, and I have for 20). The phone tree advised me to call back on business hours. I tried powering the device down by holding the power button, but it did not turn off. So, mad as a hornet, I piled my wife into the car to head back to the store right before closing.<\/p>\n
As we were driving, my not-frustrated wife fiddled with the phone and got it to reboot to the beginning of setup and got past that part of the setup, so we turned around, and when we got home, I started tapping on the semiscrutable process and, eventually, got it set up.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, I went to the gym, and I discovered that the transfer had somehow deleted the music from my watch, so I had to work out in relative silence. And I am dreadfully afraid of what might occur the next time I have to log into something using Microsoft Authenticator; I might have lost access to my account selling apps on the Microsoft Store given Microsoft’s absolutely horrible user partitioning and account setup process.<\/p>\n
Not exactly the experience of purchasing a commodity and it just working.<\/p>\n
And the worst part is that it made me feel old, being cranky about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last Saturday, we went to get new phones. And what should have been the equivalent of purchasing and using a commodity became an ordeal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35396,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35395\/revisions\/35396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}