My latest attempt Sprint to T-Mobile transition, and no.
I’m finally going for the slightly more expensive T-Mobile plan and making the attempt to finally shake the last of the Sprint nonsense. The slightly more expensive Magenta T-Mobile plan gives me the stuff that’s advertised on TV (Netflix, in flight Wi-Fi,) as well as some data prioritization in the event I needed it – which oddly I do once a week or so now.
I’m not a data hog, I just happen to need it at ~5:28pm on Friday in my neighborhood for approximately 12 minutes. Long and boring story excluded. I also want in flight Wi-Fi for the two times I year I might be on a plane. Netflix will balance the price out, and yeah.. not much reason to not do it other than every phone company interaction I’ve ever had ever.
I had previously been told by T-Mobile’s Twitter team that I was going to need to go into a corporate store with both phones, and to expect to spend some time doing the transition. I don’t have that amount of time to down two phones, and really being a parent taking both parent phones out of play means we do it during psycho busy hours with kids in tow, or do it and find out when the phones work again that somehow our kids have managed to end up at the hospital after a fall.
No seriously, every phone outage I’ve had ended up with voicemail and a nurse’s office visit. It’s absurd. Also both phones – man, that’s some time wrangling.
I saw on the new T-Mobile dashboard there was a simple cut over to Magenta option, but I had some trepidations because every change I’ve ever made in the past 22 years with this phone number has resulted in a fiasco. Foreshadowing. oooh
So today I called T-Mobile and spoke to a human. Remarkably easy. I explained what I had been told and was informed that was incorrect, may have been correct when they talked to me or there may have been a misunderstanding, but the case now was I had a T-Mobile SIM and it was 5G and would work with the current plans with no need to be in person anywhere. I explained 22 years of my phone’s account giving grief. They poo-pood that notion and thought they were invincible.
I asked the rep to assure me with the words “we will not change your phone number.” Because, well, Sprint once tried that and my phone number I just got the kids to memorize it. It’s also got a pneumonic that I tell people so they don’t forget it, and it also spells something really cool. I’ve had it for 22 years also so there’re business cards and such.
My number is only beaten mnemonically by the late Gary Austin of the Groundlings who used to just say “it takes 40 dogs to make 800 DOG TOES” and to this day I’ve had the phone number (1-800-DOG-TOES) that was given to me one time in 1997 stuck in my head. Mine’s almost that good ;)
T-Mobile rep assured me that other than Hulu going away, Netflix on Us getting added, and a slight price increase, there were going to be no issues and… then the murders started.
My account is, of course, haunted by the ghost of Sprint past. Error messages galore that the rep had never seen, escalated to a different tier who, if I remember correctly escalated it to another. It’s now in the system, network ops expecting to look at it, they expect to reach out to me on Thursday with a solution.
I told the rep it was haunted.
