Tag: life

Missing: Faith in Humanity, if found, please return

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My son has a prepaid plan on his phone, but he has an older iPhone and after getting into a bit of trouble with it at school in the spring we didn’t refill his minutes. He could text iPhone to iPhone while on wifi and could play his games so he never asked about refilling the minutes and I guess we just kinda forgot about it until last weekend. Him and his younger brother rode bike over to their cousins for a sleepover, after they left I remembered I forgot to tell him to call his grandma and say happy birthday so I sent him a text. The response I got was “who is this?” Thinking he was being a smart ass I said “your mother” the next text said “do I know you” now I’m getting irritated and replied “call your grandma or you’re coming home”. This time my phone rang when I answered a man said “this is Jose and you need to stop calling me this isn’t funny!” I mumbled something about having the wrong number and hung up. A few minutes later my son texts me (from the same number Jose called from) and said he would call her. Um what?

Ok they gave his number to Jose and clearly Jose feels all these texts are pranks like I have nothing better to do.

So today, after taking my oldest son to get his school stuff, I bought a refill card. After returning home, I attempted to activate the phone with a different number, which didn’t work out as planned and I ended up refilling Jose’s phone, I call the number on the card and hit buttons until I got to tech support.

A woman with an accent answered, after explaining my situation, she tells me to dial “*” and some numbers on the phone. I do this and the phone tells me this is invalid and hangs up. I tell her and she clicks away on a keyboard (probably googling it). After a few moments, she says “no my computer says this will work so try again” really?  I do this again and same results. She continues to insist her computer tells her this is correct and I insist that the phone is in my hand and tells me otherwise. Finally, she can’t find the answers on google so she says she will transfer me to tech support. What? I thought she was tech support. I guess you have to pass the Google tech support to get to the real deal, you know, weeding out the people who are ridiculously electronics inhibited and need help turning their phone on.  Anyway, so I get transferred…

This time a guy with an accent answers and tells me that I refilled someone else’s phone. So I asked how we fix this. He gives me an annoyed sigh and says “I can move the refill card pin to another phone number and activate the phone but only this once”. Great! A solution…but wait, did he say “just this once”?  So the next time this happens I just deal with paying for uptight Jose’s phone?  This seems slightly illegal, I imagine that it’s an empty threat to deter people from making this mistake more than once, but I can’t promise that I won’t do this again. Either way this guy fixed the problem and the kid has a new number.

I’m really going to miss Jose…