drcpunk's Journal

T-Mobil Annoyances
My Sidekick LX is currently having email issues. The IM and web are working, as are phone and text messaging functions, and probably the other functions I don't use.

The email stopped working at about 8 pm or so on Friday and is still out now, about midnight on Sunday / Monday.

ebartley said that this was happening to her as well, and that she'd called T-Mobile and been told that it was a systems update that broke something.

I tried to call at 4 am on Saturday / Sunday, but the folks at T-Mobile are there from 6 am to 1 am. Do I misremember, or did they used to be there for 24 hours a day?

I called back at 10 am or so, but wasn't near a pay phone, so was calling from my mobile. Now, given the situation, this shouldn't actually have been an issue, but the sidekick specialist said she needed me to call her from another phone.

lordess offered her phone, and the woman I was speaking to said she'd call me right back on that number. She did not.

At about 2 pm, I called T-Mobile from a pay phone, and got through to the sidekick specialists, explaining all of the above. I was told that there was "an outage". I asked what that meant, given what ebartley had told me. The woman said that ebartley was correct, and there had been a system update, and the email had broken, basically -- or, at least, whatever gets email to the phone isn't working. I see the email trying to come in, and the email I sent trying to go out, but the poor messages are stuck. I can't even delete email from my phone, and when I try, it comes back.

I can, of course, use the T-Mobile website, and I've been using my computer to check the original place the email comes from. That is, I forward email from a couple of eddresses, and I checked those sites via the phone's web interface. But, I want my phone's email working.

I asked again what "an outage" entailed. Was it a power outage? We didn't have a great phone connection, but I think she said that T-Mobile wasn't sure if it were a power outage or a database outage. It is affecting a lot of people, and T-Mobile is trying to fix it.

I asked when the email might be back up and running. She said that the estimate was "approximately 24 to 48 hours". Hm. I am wondering if that is an indirect way of saying, "The problem happened Friday evening, and we won't really be able to work on it until Monday morning."

She said that she'd credit my account with a hundred free phone minutes. This is almost useless to me. When our Road Runner cable goes down (which has been happening less and less often and more and more people use it), Time Warner has the grace to credit us for the days it's out. Granted, this is a few dollars, but by Hermes, we are being recompensed for what we actually lost! Even Con Ed gave us a monetary credit, pathetically small though it was and late though it was, for the black out when we lost most of power for days. (Yes, "most of". We were lucky.)

I did not lose phone minutes. I do not want extra phone minutes. This does not make up for loss of email capability. Honestly, even a five or ten buck credit would result in far more good will from this customer (at least, presuming I get the email back in working order on my phone within that 24 to 48 hour time frame). I know -- there's a lot of customers, so that credit towards the next bill would add up, and the economy sucks. And T-Mobile is doing something nice that doesn't cost them. But, it doesn't help me, and I'm guessing a lot of T-Mobile customers feel the same.