I had been having problems with my cell phone for quite some time.
For no reason, it would drop to ZERO bars while just sitting in the office. I could physically hold it in my hand and watch it jump from 5 bars to 0 to 3 to 0, etc. This was a major pain when Tom was in Iraq trying to call me, and he couldn’t get through!
The most frustrating part is that when I went to make a call or send a text message—making sure I had decent bars—as soon as I hit “send” it dropped back to 0 bars and my call or message wouldn’t go through.
I finally got fed up and went in to Alltel, and they tried to tell me “Maybe a new building went up that is blocking service from the tower.” Um, no. No building of such substantive measure to BLOCK cell phone service recently went up—I wanted to say You DO know you’re talking about Jacksonville, right? Have you seen any skyscrapers go up lately? 🙄 They had no other solution for me, so I just chalked it up to gremlins and went about my daily business.
It seemed to get worse (i.e. happen more often) as time wore on, so I thought maybe something was wrong with my phone, so I decided to use Tom’s phone (since he wasn’t using it 😀 and we have the same exact phone) so I took the phones in and had them switch service (just activate his phone with my number). It took less than five minutes.
Unfortunately, his had the same problem. >:XX I wanted to get my phone replaced, but Alltel couldn’t guarantee me the same phone (a NEW phone, that is—they could try to get me a refurbished one) and they couldn’t tell me which phone they would use to replace it with UNTIL I processed the warranty claim. What a joke.
So I just dealt with it, because we were still far enough away from our contract ending that if we bought a new phone, we’d have to pay full price.
Fast forward to Tom approaching his “getting home date” and having to restart service on his phone. So BOTH of our phones would be messed up. Cutting a long story short, a friend gave us an Alltel phone he wasn’t using that Tom wanted to use (it was a fancy palm-type phone) and once Tom started using it, we noticed that it didn’t drop bars like mine did. So it had to be the specific phone.
Fast forward another month or so, and I was just flat out tired of the spotty service, so we were looking at new plans (with new companies) and went to Alltel just to see if a new representative might have a new answer for us. He basically said it could be the phone itself, and if that’s the case, exchanging it wouldn’t do any good… and long story short, was there a phone we wanted to buy instead, since we were close to our contract being up and we could get any phone at the “new” (reduced) price instead of the full price.
So I got the LG Scoop in Citrus:
I love it. It has a slide out keyboard and everything. It takes the same data card as my old phone, so that’s good. It was only $50 after rebate, so that’s good. And I could get it in a color, so that’s good. It has a camera, so that’s good…but it doesn’t have a flash, so that’s not good.
They transferred all my contacts, I reorganized them all, and now we’re just waiting for the cable to come from Amazon so we can load contact photos and have our own personalized ring tones again. Oh yeah, about a week after I had mine and had decided I loved it, Tom wanted one, too. So he has gray!
YAY! Cell phones that work! And don’t drop bars!