My Cingular Hell: Round Two
Last time around was the joyous time spent with bare-bones, knowledgeless customer service from Cingular; today was time spent in the Cingular store on University Drive. I entered, signed in, sat down, and people-watched. The folks there were extremely uninteresting, so I was glad that I only had to wait fifteen minutes to be told by a nice, competent young guy that he’d have to check with his manager on my phone. As Jeff first suspected, I have a SIM-locked phone, and the Cingular store was, well, singularly unable to help me.
“Well, who unlocks SIMs around here?”
“I’ve heard that there are places that can do it, but I don’t know who to tell you to visit.” I checked his visage for a BS alert, pondering whether a Hamilton would somehow convince him to proffer information. He really didn’t seem to know, though, so I smiled, turned heel, and left the store, choosing to drown my sorrows in retail therapy at Bed, Bath, & Beyond.
I now get to do the dance around Huntsville and Madison to see who can unlock my SIM. This is going to be … fun.
Thanks to my boy Chris (from L.C.), I was able to find a resource about unlocking my SIM. I will probably drop by the Cingular store again tomorrow afternoon—I’ll be around, as I’ve got some work to do at the office tomorrow.
Geof, give me a call when you get a second.
January 21st, 2006 at 18:56I had my Motorola Smart Phone SIM-unlocked via the internet a few years ago. It was actually quite easy and cheap.
I can’t remember who did it, though.
January 21st, 2006 at 19:56Hey, sorry to hear you’re having such issues with them. I had almost the exact same thing happen to me (I also was a former Suncom customer that was forced over to Cingular). It’s almost scary how similar our stories are. Where they started differ however is the cingular store tried telling me that my SIM card was locked, and I ended up finding out that it wasn’t. But I couldn’t get them to even consider giving me another SIM card. So instead, I had them go ahead and ship me a new phone, I took the SIM card out of it, placed it in the handset I was trying to get them to give me a SIM card for, and went along using it happily. It’s not my fault they were that stupid and ended up giving me a free phone I’ll never use…
January 23rd, 2006 at 08:44