Legal Commentary

Sometimes I feel uncomfortably like a character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here's one reason why. I'm hoping that by relating this experience, it will prove useful for those of you contemplating changing your wireless service. I've generally been a fan of T-Mobile's service in the past, which is why a bit more than a year ago, I decide to buy the Blackberry Pearl from one of their stores and enter into a service agreement with them. This past summer, however, while in Berlin for the LSA conference, my beloved Pearl just randomly deleted a month's worth of emails. I was, quite unsurprisingly, frustrated by the experience, since the emails included my travel itinerary, flights, hotels, etc., and I had to call abroad to get this info resent to me. When I came back to the US and told T-Mobile's customer service that this had happened, they obliged by apologizing and giving me 500 bonus minutes.

Six months later, the same thing happened, and I reported it to T-Mobile and they helped explain that this disappearing email problem probably occurs when the memory on the phone starts to fill up. Well, that's helpful to know, I said, I'll be sure to clear the cache on my internet browser more frequently in the future, but since no one ever said in advance that that this is a limitation on the phone, I'd still like to be comped another 500 minutes. The guy said sure, and I left to go teach my class. Unfortunately, as I just found out when I called to verify the existence of my bonus minutes, the guy I spoke with then didn't record that he agreed to comp me the 500 minutes.

So the supervisor I just spoke to this evening, definitely the rudest person I've talked with during my four years as a T-Mobile customer--a super snarky person named Theresa--said a) it's just a limitation of the phone and not T-Mobile's fault, b) there's no record of giving you bonus minutes, and c) we're not giving you any more bonus minutes because you've already been compensated by bonus minutes in the past for previous service problems you've had. Wow!

I explained that if it was not T-Mobile's responsibility, why did they accept responsibility beforehand, and that they are, to all public eyes, in a joint venture with RIM, which makes the Blackberry, and because T-Mobile handles the service calls, they're in the best position to report these software glitches to RIM and have them fixed. (Clue: all it takes is a notification to users that they should monitor their Pearl's memory if they want to retain their email.) She also made it seem as if I've already received too many bonus minutes in the four years I've had an account with them, even though it's been their discretion to allocate bonus minutes after service outages. It goes without saying that if there hadn't been service or software failures, there would have been no basis for compensating their customers with bonus minutes, which are likely to be marginally costless to them anyway.  Still, she gave me a big bowl of nothing, not even an apology, despite her line worker's professions of apologies and understanding for the inconvenience of it all.

All this is a way of saying a few things, two of which I hope find their way to T-Mobile's management: first of all, T-Mobile, you've got a good customer service record which is in real jeopardy when you employ mean and unprofessional service managers like Theresa in your ranks. Second, if Theresa was following a policy of capping the bonus minutes customers are entitled to because of service and software problems they've experienced, then you've got really screwy policies, since you should want to have customers report these problems rather than have them simply conclude the service/hardware one buys from T-Mobile is just crappy and worth leaving the moment a problem like this erupts. This is especially the case when the problem can be resolved relatively easily.

Last, if T-Mobile is going to blithely disclaim responsibility for the service it provides for the phones it sells and brands with its name, then that's a good reason, I think, for the government to require that providers let me use my current phone with multiple providers, rather than having to buy a new phone in a new service contract when I have a perfectly good one (with a software glitch I can plan around once I'm told about it). In other words, it seems pretty weird to force me to buy a new phone if I could just as easily take my working phone to a different wireless provider, where hopefully the Theresas of the world have been weeded out. Kevin Martin, this post is for you too.  (I should note: I'm not entirely sure what the rules are now, but the practices I'm familiar with definitely seem to discourage taking phones from one provider and using it with different providers.)