Ultimate Rant o' Cell Phone Customers (Part I)

These are some of my pet-peeves when it comes to people and cell phones. As the original just kept growing with rage, I decided to break it into several installments.

Overage
Personally, I have had four different cell phone companies over the course of the past ten years or so. I'd imagine most people have either also had several different companies or a phone for quite some time. Yet, some things that are common with every other company in the industry seem to jump out and surprise people before peeing on their couch and stealing the beer in the fridge. Unless you have an unlimited minute plan, you know you have a set amount of minutes you can use in a given period, roughly thirty days. If you exceed these minutes, you are charged extra. While the price you pay per minute may vary, the basic concept has been around since the advent of cell phones. The same concept has since been expanded to text message and internet usage. Bottom-line, if you’re not paying for unlimited, you take that risk. Plan accordingly.

Taxes
Rarely do I see people complain that their McDouble was not an even dollar as most people seem to understand that you pay taxes on most things you buy at a store. Unfortunately, these same people don’t seem to apply the same logic to services like cell phone service. If you are upset that your bill is not a nice, round $49.99, you are an idiot and you need to complain to your congressman or other elected official as your beef is with the gummint, not the company that is forced to collect these taxes. The same thing applies to regulatory fees like those to provide emergency services with your location if you have an emergency. You may not use these on a daily basis, but you’re going to be paying for them regardless and you’d probably be pissed if you died in a frozen tundra or were mauled by mutated cannibals in West Virginia because no one found you.

Changing Companies
Certainly you remember when you messed up, your previous company refused to remove accurate charges from your bill, so you decided to stick it to them and go somewhere else. If this seems fuzzy, certainly you can see that your phone is now different and your bill has another company’s name at the top? All of this means what you paid for, what your plan was, or what that last company did is no longer relevant. Your last company may have given you free phones every third day because you were so awesome, but we don’t. You may have been able to go four months without paying a bill before, but now you can’t. Your plan may have included free incoming calls, unlimited text messages included, and complimentary psychiatric service, but you opted to leave that company. I’m not sure why you would, but don’t assume that your current service is just like your last one. As we illustrated before, it’s not.

What's in a EULA?

As I was creating a new GMail account last week for the best movie website ever, I got to thinking about the oft-overlooked end user license agreement, or EULA. You may not know the term, but you've no doubt come across a encyclopedia-type document when installing a new program or signing up for a service account online. Theoretically, this verbiage will let you know what you can and cannot do with the program, what rights the developer has, and all sorts of additional boring information. I say theoretically because I seriously doubt anyone has ever read a single one of these in its entirety.

For the GMail EULA, out of sheer curiosity I copied and pasted the text into a Word document and out came 14 pages! Granted, the paragraphs did have a healthy space in between them so in actuality it may be about nine pages instead. While nine pages isn't War and Peace, it does represent a whole lot more time than I care to invest in setting up a simple email account. Now, there may be pertinent information in there as to how the harvested data is used and secured and if Google reserves the right to your first born if its lust for world domination isn't enough but I don't really care enough to read it. At least there isn't a pop quiz at the end.

13-year-old Girls of All Ages Weep

Having worked in the industry, I really have no patience or sympathy for people who bitch about cell phones.

Call it jaded, bitter, or whatever, but I can safely say I've heard 99% of the b-s that comes out of people's mouths in defense of whatever credit or phone they are trying to get. Even when a legitamate issue happens, my heart turns to stone and I spit venom at any toddler or panhandler in my vicinity.

Sidekicks, the phone not the stupid comic book plot, have been popular for years attracting celebrities, tween girls, and wannabes for both categories. As with many phone platforms, Sidekick data service went out over a week ago as has been steadily coming back, even if all the user data didn't make the return flight.

While it's a sucky situation, T-Mobile has now confirmed credits will be issued to any affected users ranging from a month of service to $100 for something that is ultimately Microsoft's fault.

So, given this situation, the next time my car breaks down, I am totally going after Wawa for $500 in free gas!

$2000 Worth of Poo

If you are like me, the thought of those swimming through their vaults of dimes and pennies makes you sick. Not at the actual prospect of a nickel and zinc bath per se, but the fact that you do not have one of your own.

If you are one of those pricks with ample money to blow on stupid crap, feast your eyes on this:



Yes, the Motorola AURA (aka WTF ARE YOU THINKING!!!) has stereo Bluetooth, a Swiss-made bearing, and a bunch of other shit I don't understand the point of in a phone.

I have high hopes for Motorola with the CLIQ but if I happen to see anyone carrying this, I will punch them squarely in the genitalia.

Motorola.com: AURA™ by Motorola

Stars of the Week: 7/5/2009

Here is a celebration of various stories deemed worthy enough to have a star in my Google Reader.

Consumerist: E.U. Agrees To Universal Standard For Phone Chargers
Nice in theory, but then I would have to change out all of my mini-USB cords and freakin' Apple products probably still wouldn't apply. Get on the ball Steve!

Variety: BET Awards salutes Michael Jackson
Does anything about Michael Jackson really belong on BET anymore? Just asking ...

FT.com: Deficit forces California to issue IOUs
Why am I reminded of the scene in Dumb and Dumber with the briefcase full of slips of paper?

Bluetootheses: You're Doing It Wrong!

Bluetooth technology is great!

Did you know that you can make your computer Bluetooth enabled so that pictures and videos on your cellular telephone can be transferred with ease?

Did you also know that you can connect your computer to your phone via Bluetooth and access internet on your computer through the phone or that you can pipe music from your phone to your car sterio?

Did you also know that wearing a Bluetooth headset makes you look like a prick who is either

a) pompous
b) arrogant
c) merely trying to look cool
OR
d) all of the above?

It was bad enough when the wired headset first gained popularity. While shopping for a new suit in the mall or getting tires replaced, you were accosted by people seemingly having schizophrenic conversations with themselves, only to discover you missed the litte dangling wire and they were talking on their phone.

Now, the same problems still apply but you have folks walking around with a g-d headset on at all times. I can understand the ease of not having to strain your muscles and hold the phone up to your head when you are driving, changing a diaper, or playing video games and some people may use their phones enough to warrant having one permanently implanted into their inner ear canal (how would you charge that?).

But if you are just walking around looking like you have a growth on your ear and not even using it, you need to rethink things. At least the Jason Bourne wired headset wasn't as tacky looking.

The Real Reason You Have Crappy Coverage on Your Cell Phone

The next time you are trying to place a call on your cell phone and it does not go through, instead of blaming your wireless provider, consider some alternative causes to your problem.

Your coverage could be affected by many outside factors including your proximity to the nearest tower, usage patterns by those also in your area, materials and architecture type of the building you may be in, or some a-hole who pilfers materials and subsequently jacks up the cell tower.

NBC12: Copper stolen from cell tower in Chesterfield

When Music is Bad for You

At first glance at the headline, I thought this Scientific American article had to do with the hordes of terrible alternative rock and hip-hop songs that make you long for a seizure to escape the damaging mental effects of shitty music. As it turns out, for Stacey Gayle, music was actually causing her to have seizures. While a rare condition which would certainly make having a normal life difficult, I hope that someone afflicted with this condition, musicogenic epilepsy, would be brave enough to go to a shitty concert, have a seizure, and subsequently sue the group out of existence.

This may be a very effective way to reduce the number of terrible bands clogging the airwaves.

Scientific American: When Your Favorite Song Gives You Seizures

Don't Give Yourself a Brain Tumor

I spoke with a customer today who was upset that his account had been flagged as non-profitable. Generally, these designations are reserved for people who use their phones more often than not on another carrier's towers. Since we still have to pay that carrier their roaming dues, we are stuck with an account that is depleting the ever present "bottom-line."

On occasion however, unprofitable accounts can be flagged for another joy we call "excessive usage." What is excessive? How is this arbitrary term defined? Why can't Sunnis and Shiites live together in harmony? Find out these answers and more! (And by more I mean the first two but not necessarily the third).

We offer calling plans that are unlimited in the sense that you don't pay additional provided you follow all the rules of your plan. Granted, all that is not spelled out in promotional marketing (although it should be), but one would assume unlimited within reason. What is reasonable for an unlimited plan? Most people I've had the "pleasure" of coming across have had approximately 2000-4000 minutes used per month. That equates to around 33 to 66 hours per month. While it certainly seems excessive for most, those figures are not outside of the norm that we might see. Some may take it a step further, racking up around 6000 to 10,000 minutes per month, representing 100 or more hours per month. That's a lot of talking! However, this still does not raise the bean counter's red flags of hemorrhaging money.

This man I met today had a monthly average anywhere between 12,000 and 15,000 minutes per month. That's 250 hours per month, corresponding to about 8 hours a day on the phone. However, one month, the bill reflected 22,237 total minutes used over a standard thirty (30!) day billing period made up in 2,861 total calls. As we break that down, that is 370 total hours of talking per month which breaks down to 12.5 hours per day on the phone.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is excessive.

When you talk on the phone more than I do, keeping in mind that I converse on the phone for a career(?), you know you have a problem. I certainly hope his lower-level dealers weren't causing trouble or ripping him off or else he'd likely talk you to death ... and probably then go after your Auntie.

Don't Pay for Crap You Already Own

Why does this young girl have such a bright smile on her face while she talks on her cellular telephone? Is she telling her parents about her acceptance to Harvard? Was she just asked on a date at the local Starbucks? Is she enjoying the anal-rapage of her bank account? Prior to this conversation commencing, she was treated to the smooth sounds of Jay-Z that she had purchased for the mere pittance of $3.49 from her service provider.

Unbeknown to her (and many others who make up the $600 million ringtone customer base), ringtones are the biggest ripoff since Amway.

In a vintage article from early '06, Wired explains why it is absurd to pay a company for a small fragment of a track that you likely already own. Ringtone prices can range from $2 for crappy, synthesized versions like you might hear in an NES game) to $3 or perhaps even more if you enroll in a sketchy subscription service. If you consider that an average CD is 12 tracks, you would be paying over $30 to purchase a small fraction of a full-length CD. As pointed out in the article, it costs more to download a ringtone than it does to download a legitimate MP3.

All you have to do is purchase a Bluetooth adapter (if your phone is so configured) or a data cable to connect your phone to a computer. Either of these cost around $30. Next, download an MP3 editing software such as Audacity or MP3 Wav Editor, cut down the song in question, transfer it to your phone, and you are good to go and didn't expend $3 in the process.

Now, you have more money to spend on beer, string cheese, or being carbon neutral. Don't you feel better about yourself already?