While we’re ranting about sucky things on this blog, such as movies, cheap parts, wireless routers, and inconsiderate neighbors, I’m going to rant on how much Cingular sucks!
The only reason I broke my contract with Verizon Wireless was because I had my eye on the Nokia 6230, which is only offered in the US by Cingular. I was also dissatisfied with Verizon due to their lack of good, non-crippled phones.
I ordered my new phone from Letstalk.com and opted to have my number ported from Verizon. That process went somewhat smoothly — it saved me from having to even call Verizon Customer Service to cancel my service — they did it for me and billed me later for the early termination fee. The problem I had was that Letstalk.com waited to ship the phone to me until this process was complete. That’s fine, except I no longer had a working cell phone.
“No problem,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just call Cingular and have them forward my calls to my work phone.” Now, I’ve techincally been a customer with Cingular for about, oh, 12 hours. I’m placed on hold for several minutes and some girl who can’t articulate her words well with a bunch of noises of her typing away at a keyboard answers. I tell her that I ordered a new phone, but haven’t received it yet and I want to activate call forwarding on my line. The first thing out of her mouth: Just go into your phone’s menu and activate call forwarding from there. AHH! The moron didn’t even listen — I explain the situation to her again. She puts me on hold for a while, then asks me what number to forward it to. Note to self, don’t call customer service ever again!
When I received my phone, I had to exchange it because the backlights on the keypad mysteriously stopped working (for the few of you who know the truth — shh!!). I took it to a Cingular store and they said I can’t exchange it until I’ve had it for AT LEAST 30 days. So I called letstalk.com and got an RMA number for an exchange. After asking and asking for a “rapid exchange” type of exchange, where I get my new phone before I send my old phone (to minimize downtime), they keep saying “no, we won’t ship you the replacement until you give us the tracking number for the old one”. Fine — Eric had an old unlocked nokia phone that I borrowed until I got my replacement.
Over a month goes by and I have yet to receive a bill from Cingular. After a while, I was finally able to register for an account online. Online it shows my bill being past due! WTF? I click the link to “View my bill” and it says my account info in unavailable and logs me out. So, I call the dreaded customer service number…. after a long wait on hold again, I get a customer service rep who sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. No problem! I’ll waive the late fee and put a free order for a bill reprent that will be mailed to you! He even agreed that their website sucks since it kept kicking users out all the time.
Afterwards, I log in to pay my first bill, enter my CC# and everything, and get this error message:
[code lang=”java”]
–java.lang.Exception: CamQuickPayCreditCardException: Sat Jan 22
20:14:21 CST 2005, CamBillMappingBean:quickPayCreditCard:Failed to
call cam business method; ========= Nested CefException is:========
com.cingular.cef.automation.exception.CamBusinessException:
CamBusinessException: Sat Jan 22 20:14:21 CST 2005, Error calling
Business Method in CamBillQuickPayCreditCard at
com.cingular.cef.automation.automationfacade.AutomationSystemBean.populateCommonExceptionHashMapKeys(AutomationSystemBean.java:235)
at
com.cingular.cef.automation.automationfacade.AutomationSystemBean.populateCommonHashMapKeys(AutomationSystemBean.java:193)
at
[/code]
Wow… it posted my payment anyway though… and yes, it still charged my card. I’d hate to be a n00b at this and dread the moment of calling customer service again just to pay the bill.
My next bill had a charge on it “Bill reprent fee”, which I also had to complain about. The rep almost didn’t want to side with me, until re-explained the ENTIRE situation to her again. <sigh>… well THAT charge was finally removed.
Now, I have a girlfriend and we’re text messaging eachother back and forth several dozen times per day. I log in to the website to check my message usage, and i’m well over my 100 message limit! Now, back in the day, Verizon used to allow you to upgrade your plan before the billing cycle ended to avoid overage charges (I heard they don’t do this now, though). So I thought, well, mabye Cingular will do this for me! It took a **LOT** of convincing to avoid nearly $100 in overages, but they upgraded my text messaging account for me. The rep basically said, “We have this policy that allows you one plan change per year if you go over… <puts me on hold> … Oh, wait, we don’t do this anymore…”. She ended up doing it for me anyway since she realized she was an idiot for telling me false information.
I must say the only “somewhat” positive experience with them was when I called Tech Support to complain about my text messages not being delivered to my T-Mobile girlfriend, duplicate messages being received and charging me for them, and my phone saying the text messaging service being unavailable. The guy put in a support request for my area and gave me 1 month of unlimited messaging. Since then, my phone has reported no more errors with sending messages, but I still get dupes and late-deliveries.
Finally, today, I don’t receive my bill again… not via e-mail or snail-mail. Online showed nothing. So I log in today to see if one has been posted yet but not e-mailed, and my account is now past due. No bill, no prior notices, no nothing. Just a past due bill. Here we go again.
I clicked the link to e-mail their customer service, but they limit you to 1000 characters in the e-mail. Plus the page took about 3 minutes to fully load. Oh, and their website was loading something from 2o7.net (see pics below). So, I gave up and wrote this rant instead.
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Cingular loading something that looked weird…
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2o7.net when I visited it….
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Something about requiring a cookie to keep you anonymous seem weird to anyone besides me???
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In January, when my Cingular contract is over, I’m switching to T-Mobile and keeping my unlocked Nokia 6230. This was the last straw. Thank you for your patience if you read this far!
Update 10/17/2005:
I Did *MIN# and logged into “My Account” at the same time …
BTW, this rant doesn’t even include the fact that I finally got my LetsTalk.com $50 rebate, which was originally submitted in February, just two weeks ago (October).
Last night, Cingular’s online billing service (“My Account”) was unavailable and *MIN# didn’t work. Sure sounds like to me they were having issues. Today, I can log in, but it can’t show me any account history, such as the number of text messages or minutes I’ve used “due to a recent change in my rate plan.” WTF? I didn’t make ANY changes to my rate plan!
I sure hope I can put up with this lousy service until January without losing my sanity.
Urge to kill…rising…
Eeew That sucks. Speaking of sucky things Internet explorer hung XP Pro when I was trying to read this blog!
Just to rub in how much better T-Mobile is… I went to Canada recently… I still had text and voicemail service as if I was back in the USA on T-Mobile’s service area.
When I had Verizon, I could roam in Canada just as seamlessly (Although it was $0.69/min). In fact, at my house in Eastern Washington, there was no cell service out in my area. If I held my phone in just the right spot, I could get just enough signal from a Canadian tower to make/receive calls (but Canada roaming fees applied).
I’d expect Cingular to have canadian coverage, too… right? On second thought I better not expect much from them at this point. When I was on my road trip, when I was driving right next to the mexican border getting sniffed by police dogs, my phone’s operator logo was something weird (sorry don’t remember what it was called, but definately was not cingular!).
Oh, now *MIN# and MyAccount are working … but their data conflicts (see post update).
As of 2005-10-27 my Cingular bill for the period of 2005-09-13 thru 2005-10-12 is finally available on the website. I have not received anything in the mail, nor an e-mail to inform me of this (I only know because i’ve been checking the website nearly every day since the 14th). It is $62.55. Also, it is due 2005-11-02, less than one week from its availability. These business practices are outright absurd.
Also, as of today, my *646# and on-line viewing of minutes used finally match each other. Sounds to me like they’ve been having more billing system problems (what’s new???). Before today, they were both incrementing at the same rate, but were off by 135 minutes.
Their website is slower than molassas today. It took about 45 seconds for the login-process to complete (watching that stupid orange Cingular guy jumping up and down trying to tell me its MY connection speed that is slow while my connection just sits idle waiting for their java servlets to do their thing). Just trying to view my bill detail took about 2 minutes before data started transferring to my web browser.
Update: 2005-10-28, I finally received an e-mail notification of my Cingular bill due. I have 5 days before it is past due.
Additonally, as of today, I am finally able to view my text messaging summary for the current month. The detail view says my account information is still unavailabe.