“Raising the bar?” What other direction could they go in?
Cingular is really raising my blood pressure. Ever since I “migrated” to Cingular from AT&T Wireless, I’ve had lousy signal strength everywhere. For example, at my office I used to get 5 bars of signal on AT&T; now on Cingular I get 2 on a good day. At home? Nothin’. Nada.
A short search on the net yields thousands of the same complaint. Evidently, Cingular phones are programmed to only lock on to Cingular towers — not Cingular AND A&T towers. If the phone detects one tiny milliwatt of signal from a Cingular antenna, it’ll ignore the AT&T antenna, even if it’s got a better signal.
Twice now I’ve called to complain. The first time, the rep sent a reprogramming signal to my phone, but that did nothing.
Tonight, I spent an unproductive half hour on the phone with another rep. Finally, when she had no options for me, I told her I wanted the “network block” taken off my phone — that’s the programming that Cingular puts on there to keep you from being able to choose a network. The option just doesn’t exist in the menus. She was strangely silent, then busied herself on her computer claiming that she didn’t know if they had that capability… then the call dropped. (I was on a regular line, not the mobile.)
The thing that pisses me off the most is this: the woman knew my telephone number, but didn’t call me back. There’s obviously no way I could call her back, I have no idea where she is or what number to reach her at.
So, the next time I have an hour to spare, I’ll have to start the whole process over yet again.
Poor, poor customer service. They should always ask for a phone number to call you back at — especially a wireless company with poor signal quality.
Tell them the only way they can make it up to you is to send over the Karshner triplets to reprogram your phone in person (and clean your house wearing only board shorts while they’re there…)