i spent a cumulative 3 days of my vacation just... on the line with customer service to upgrade my dad's phone.
it turns out the "unlocked" pixel 3 i got him arrived as a pixel 3a that is, somehow, both locked to t-mobile and verizon, meaning neither work properly! after being told repeatedly by customer service his old sim card would not 'be compatible' with the new phone, i tried it anyways. just to test.
and. it worked fine! he got texts! he got voicemails!
but he could only call customer service for his provider. who said the card could not be activated, because it is not "compatible" with the very phone im calling them on in that exact moment
we tried e-sim, an oxymoron of technology designed to walled-garden a physical system which was itself built to be hardware-agnostic... BUT it seems verizon stopped supporting e-sims on older pixel models, despite the tech still being on the fucking phone
i would have had to root my dad's "unlocked" phone just to disable the artificial walls put up for the fear that i might dare switch providers! even if it's from simple mobile to simple mobile.
since i've gotten back home, i've then wasted another several hours just trying to pay my own fucking phone bill. i couldn't update my card on their site without getting a generic "your payment info could not be updated" error. so, back to customer fucking service for ting this time
see, for safety reasons, text chat can't help with payment issues. so i called the ting help line. apparently ting was sold to dish at some point, who also own boost mobile. this might explain why i was twice redirected incorrectly to boost mobile support who had to re-redirect me, before finally being told, quote
"i'm not sure what's wrong either. call your bank, then try calling back in 24 hours?"
calling my bank reveals seven different $1 hold charges to my account from ting. i had enough for payment in my bank before this happened, but not after. they nickle and dimed me because it's a non-issue to them. it's not like dish are the ones being charged poverty fees!
that's the point though, isn't it?
all this time all i can think is: not a single person responsible for any of these decisions is in the room. not one human who actually understands why this is happening is here. customer support is trained on how to deal with preconceived issues, but not the effects of those issues.
i had to call customer service to activate a phone. i had to call customer service to pay my phone bill. i had to call my bank to pay my phone bill.
i need to have a phone to have a phone, or else i'm probably too poor to be worth trying to sell a third phone to.
customer service reps are just the mask put on by a company to make you feel guilt for anger at their anti-consumer bullshit. 'don't yell at this human shield i've put between us, how dare you!'
