The Last Straw

Today I could take it no more....I had tried so hard to learn to both use and love my new LG cell phone but I reached my breaking point. My Gulftel ground line had been down since last week, and the LG cell phone had gone into bizzarr-o mode. I tried turning if off, to re-boot it, hoping it would wake up in a better mood, but it refused to turn off, and was caught in a loop of endless reboots each time exhibiting the same problems--

as in: I could not make an outgoing call nor receive an incoming one...

...I sat with my book for about 45 min, reading and trying things, but finally decided it was TIME for a DIFFERENT PHONE. I had purchased it at W-M originally because the Cingular place is way up on the north side of Foley and always really crowded, so I went back to W-M first. I got no where there, even after I got the dept manager involved because it had been 45 days , not under 30 days as their policy states. They kept saying only the Cingular store can do anything.

I got back in traffic and drove up to the real Cingular store, where it is Take-a-Number...for real. I was hoping I would get this nice black guy who works there, and I did.

I have paid the $4.95 a month insurance thing ever since the service was BellSouth, thru AT&T days and my phone was attached to my car with a curly cord and never filed a claim. So I figure surely they will do something for me and swap me out for a Nokia...I don't care what it looks like, if it is used, has dents or scratches, all I want to do is make phone calls and be able to use it internationally. (Some you can, some you can't ). I don't need Bluetooth, etc.

I was really nice but told the guy in a soft voice as my hands shook, that he needed to know that he was dealing with someone on the verge of a telephone induced nervous breakdown and that I'd be real easy to please, just take this #@&*% LG phone back and give me some kind of a Nokia and THAT I WAS NOT LEAVING THE STORE WITH OUT A DIFFERENT PHONE.

What happened after that is way too long to type blow by blow, but let me only say I should get an Acadmey Award for today's performance.....it started of soft and sweet, but they did not want to budge an inch off the 30 days policy....and the only phone that fit my needs would cost me $250, no credit for my brand new LG clamphone. I even offered to sign up for 2 more years contract, nothing doing they said. 4 years--NO.

It is a wonder i did not end up in jail...at one point , in a whisper, i threatened to drive my Tropper thru the plate glass in the store front. They didn't like threats that involved property damage, I could tell....All the time that we went round and round about my troubled phone (and mind), the Cingular place was filling with people, waiting their turn, so my audience was growing. I sensed that this was to my advantage. Meanwhile, all of a sudden the phone starts working correctly--so they claim that it is not malfunctioning... so they said the insurance was of no use.
They admitted that the voice mail function was not working correctly, but said they could 'fix' that but I'd lose my unheard messages.

One of the TV affiliates has an office in the same shopping strip, so i told them i would rip my hair out by the roots and Fox news would come from down the street and film it....I mean I didn't start with all this but had to resort to it to get action. I got them to total up what I had spent on monthly insurance fees since I first became a customer.

I got my customer service rep to go to the back and discuss the situation with his manager, which he dissapeared in the back, I suppose to do, but returned to say again and again that nothing could be done with out me shelling out $250 bucks. After I had hit what seemed like a total brick wall and the store was FULL of people, being pretty close to tears a lot of the time lately, I burst into tears, and cried out in a voice to fill the room that I never imagined in all these years of being a loyal Cingular customer that I would be treated in such a manner--which had everyone's attention, and I HAD THE FLOOR....so I went on to elaborate on the shoddyness of the situation, the amount of money involved, (gasps from the audience), and there must have been a hidden button under the counter because the grand pou-pah manager came dashing out , all smiles, and said "Madame, we shall remedy this unfortunate situation immediately"---which he did, much to my satisfaction and that of my audience. And we were all on great terms and smiles before I left there. But let me tell you I WAS DRAINED. The whole thing took about an hour.
I hate it that things had to get to this level...but I had made up my mind that I was not going to leave that place without a different phone, no matter what it took.
I guess I know how Vivian Leigh must have felt after a day of filming. Those actresses deserve every penny of those high salaries. The way I figure it, I was working at about $250 an hour in that Cingular place today.
My new Nokia phone is charging now.