"Cell hell", "Caveat Emptor!", or "1800Mobiles sucks"?

I couldn't decide on the title for this post. But its a tale of woe and misfortune whatever I call it.

Part of acquiring a product is the purchasing process and that deserves a review as well, especially if it goes wrong. These days I rarely walk into a store and purchase something without a lot of research and selection of where I'm buying. Unless I really absolutely need something today I'll almost always consider waiting a few days to order it online especially if there is a decent price differential. However I also like to choose a reasonably well known and reputable store and until now I've done business with a whole bunch of them very successfully and never had a single problem.

Unfortuntately this time, when ordering a new Motorola V300 phone I broke my golden rule and failed to look for merchant reviews first, now I really wish I'd checked Epinions or some other such place. My mistake all started when I followed a link from Phonescoop.com which is a very good and useful phone selection and review site. I made the mistake of quality by association, I assumed since Phonescoop is good then they would pick good vendors to advertise on their site.

Now what do they say about assumption? Yes, that's right folks, assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.

So here is my sorry tale, so far, of my fuck up...

I picked 1800mobiles because it was $30 cheaper than Amazon and they had the data CD and cable I wanted available for order. I figured I'd do everything at once and save $30 which pays the T-mobile activation fee. Now I also see that Buy.com has both the phone and data cable and also has the same price. Doh.

I ordered my phone with T-Mobile service and porting to Sprint on Tuesday 27th. The site said orders received after 3:30pm EST would be considered for shipment the next day so I thought I should hear from them on Wednesday. Even though they charged my card on the Tuesday, two days later on Thursday I've heard nothing. So I call them up.

The first thing I notice is the customer service person is clearly Indian. Now I know quite a lot of Indian people, quite a few are good friends, so even with all the ho-ha about outsourcing right I just think to myself "Oh, they have outsourced customer service". Of course I may be wrong, I could just happen to be talking to someone who is Indian who is in the USA, goodness knows, like Brits there are plenty living in the USA. Also her English is excellent, impecable I'd say, and we have no communication problems at all. However you could say that since I've known and been listening to Indian people pretty much all my life I have an easier time understanding even a strong Indian accent than I do someone from the deep South of the USA.

Anyway, the customer service person helpfully confirms all my details and checks my order. She comes back and tells me I had ordered a plan that was a special offer and isn't available any more. At this point I'm somewhat anoyed at them that they didn't call me on Wednesday as they could have done. But I'm also annoyed at myself I actually suspected the service plan wasn't available anymore and I was hoping I'd got a deal by accident. Okay, so strike that one off to me being a cheapskate. I select a different plan and wait...

On Friday lunch time I go to make a call on my Sprint phone and find its not working. "Great" I think, that means my number has been ported and they'll ship today. So I call up later on Friday (calll two) and they say my phone is still in the activation department awaiting activation. Its a different person this time, but still an Indian accent so by this time I'm about 75% certain their customer service is outsourced. I tell the person I've already had my Sprint service disconnected so it must have been ported already. Right they say, "its awaiting activation". No I say, you can't port a number to a non-activated phone, that's not the way it works, you activate the phone and then they port. I know this because I had called T-Mobile on the Tuesday I ordered to make sure it could be ported. That means my phone doesn't go dead until the new T-Mobile service is active and my number is ported or in the middle of porting. No they say, "its being activated and as soon as its activated we'll ship it, should be today".

Okay, I'm losing confidence now but put it down to bad luck and kick myself for not not calling on Wednesday because now its Friday and there's no chance the phone will get shipped until Monday which means no phone until Wedesday which means five or more days without mobile service.

Monday arrives and I check the 1800Mobile.com web site in the afternoon. It still says my phone is awaiting activation. So I call again (call three) and yet another guy answers, this time its Jake, and yes, another Indian accent. I actually worked with an Indian guy called Jake before, a really great guy but I'm sure he's not doing customer service now, at least I hope not. Anyway, Jake tells me my number hasn't been ported yet, and this process takes from 3 hours to 10 days and rest assured as soon as its done they'll send me and email to notify me of shipping.

So I still write it off as bad luck, I'm the 1% that gets the really long porting time due to some screw up. At the back of my mind I think I should maybe called T-Mobile and ask them. But I don't...

Tuesday arrives and I call 1800Mobiles first thing (call four) and notice on their voice menu they have an option to check your WLNP porting status. So I select this and bingo, I get some chirpy guy with an American accent. The guy says within 10 seconds, "Oh yes your phone is here, its activated, ported and ready to ship, you'll have it by Friday". Great I think. Eureka. Seven days without mobile service but ultimately not a disaster.

At 6pm on Tuesday I check my email - no notification that the phone shipped. Fuck. So I call them up - call five.

Its too late for the WLNP number this time so I have to speak to customer service again. This time its Jake again, I remember him and he remembers me. He looks up my order and checks on it and tell me in a somewhat patronizing tone that "As I told you yesterday sir, your phone is in the activation department and it takes up to ten days to activate". So I tell Jake that I called this morning and had been told it was activated already and should have shipped today. He give me the same story again. Its awaiting activation, just be patient. At this point I seriously believe that my phone was actually activated and ported on Friday but something's screwed up and that it hasn't shipped. I tell Jake that and ask if maybe he can fix the problem or at least find out. He tells me the same thing over again.

So Jake's customer service training kicks in and he starts trying to calm me down since I must be getting somewhat irritated. However telling me the same thing four times over doesn't help any more than it does three time over and our convesation is quickly boiling down to a "I said... you said" argument that was going nowhere. At that point I decide to give up and hang up.

The conclusion I've come to is that since their customer service is outsourced overseas they really have no ability to do anything except take orders and tell you the order status that on their website. Since they really have nothing to do with 1800Mobiles (who is actually just another name for A1Wireless) my best bet is to talk to the porting information guy I spoke to and try to get the name of a real person.

So its now over one week since I ordered, one week since my credit card was charged, five days with no cellphone service and my phone isn't even in the mail yet. Tomorrow first thing I'm on a mission to track down someone at 1800Mobiles who knows what the heck is going on and I'm going to demand overnight delivery so I can get my phone before next week because if it doesn't ship this Wednesday that's the earliest I'll see it. And you know what? T-Mobile is probably already billing me for my service... I'm going to give them a call too and I'm going to complain to Phonescoop.com

In short, next time check the merchant reviews and be ready to pay a little extra to order with a reputable merchant.

I'll update this posting if and when I get my phone. From the looks of the other reviews it seems as though I may get screwed on the rebates and have a lot of trouble canceling the order.

Do I feel lucky? Not any more...