Surrender

As you can tell from the previous two posts, I received a smart phone for Christmas with which I have already become well acquainted. If you've read this blog from the beginning, or the middle, you'll also know that I am, to put it mildly, anti-cellphone. So I guess you can call this my surrender post, surrendering to the technological miracles that have occurred these past few years. But in a way, I really haven't changed those opinions - I'm still anti-cellphone. I didn't get my new Motorola Droid 2 Global in order to be on the phone all the time. I decided to get it for all the other things it can do, i.e. the camera and camcorder, the ability to get mail, weather, and news, the ability to connect on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. I went with an Android phone because I think it will eventually surpass the iPhone. Open-source systems will always win out over closed-source. Apple has the lead right now but I expect that to fade, and rapidly, over the next few years.

Getting the phones themselves was quite an ordeal. My wife has had a cell phone for years and she wasn't due for new equipment until April, according to the Verizon contract. So we called Verizon last Saturday to see if we could get out of that contract in exchange for us both getting a new Droid 2 global and adding me to the plan, along with the new family package. No problem, they said. I spent an hour on the phone with the guy working out all the details. He gave me my order number, I wrote it down, he said I'd have my phones by the following Tuesday, and we hung up. All set.

Not so fast. The following day, Sunday, I checked my email to discover....nothing. Normally when buying these devices you'll receive and email from the vendor immediately after the order is placed. I searched online for the order number I'd been given, to no avail. So I called Verizon back, asking them to check on the status of the order. I spoke to three people, none of whom could find the order. So it was back to the drawing board. We set up the same contract again: my wife kept her old line, I received a new one, we got the 2-for-1 deal on the phone, the contract, and a couple of other goodies thrown in. They said they would overnight it, meaning we would get them Tuesday.

At work on Tuesday morning, my wife called to tell me she received an email from Verizon directing her to sign into our account to look at the details of the new plan. She did and discovered that there were three phones on our plan: hers, the one I got on the Sunday re-call, and some other mysterious number we'd never heard of. I called Verizon back.

After explaining the situation to the salesperson she put me on hold for awhile. When she came she told me that what happened was that since my wife was not due for new equipment until April they had to add an extra phone number to the order to get us the 2-for-1 deal on the new phones. All we needed to do once we received the phones was to activate the mystery number, then call them back for an equipment change to change the new device over to my wife's number. Since we were getting that third line for a $9.99 monthly fee and they were holding a promotion that deducted that fee for the life of the contract, we would not be charged anything extra. Just call us in two years once the contract is up, she said, and we'll drop the third line.

Well, you can imagine my frustration. No one had ever mentioned a third line to us, much less this convoluted way of getting my wife's number changed over to the new phone. I told the woman that some manager over there MUST be able to override this nonsense but she assured me she was part of the management team and that's the way it had to be done. If she could do anything about it she would, but nothing could be done. I called my wife back, explained the situation, and when she started asking me questions I advised her that it was better for everyone if I just stopped talking about it now. She understood.

Fedex tried to deliver the phones on Tuesday but we weren't home.  They left a note saying they would try again the following day. Funny though, there were two separate orders from two separate delivery guys. I thought it strange they would send each phone out in a separate order. You can probably guess what happened next. I was home when Fedex came back on Wednesday to deliver the phones. Four phones, to be exact. I realized what had happened immediately. The very first order had been placed after all. Why no one could find it when we called back the following day, who knows? And the third line was the phone number they had assigned to me on the first day's order. It had nothing to do with the way the order had to be placed in order to get us the 2-for-1 deal, as the Monday salesperson had assured me.

After another hour on the phone with Verizon on Wednesday straightening things out, and mailing back the phones from the second order yesterday, we're all set.

I think.

And that's the story of how we got our new smart phones.