The other day, I was talking to the mobile kiosk lady at Sam’s – just chit-chatting, really – and the topic of text messages and text plans came up. She told me about a new plan/feature that you can get, but you have to call them to get it.

Simply put, you add $5 to your current text messaging plan and you can get unlimited mobile-to-mobile texts. Since I currently had the 400 for $10 plan, I called today and told them to change my plan to the 200 for the $5 plan and add the $5 for unlimited mobile-to-mobile. Make sense?

Most of the people I text are Cingular customers, anyway. Just a handful isn’t and I think the 200 on that end should do me fine until we switch to T-Mobile this summer…

So check it out if you already do the text thing…

This time, I would like to concentrate on their website. IT SUCKS! And here are the reasons why:

1. The UI (user interface) and navigation are really confusing.
As you can see, by viewing this website, I am no stranger to the web, however, I find their website to be the most confusing piece of crap there has ever been. I always end up going in circles looking for what I need. Instead of all roads leading to Rome, all links lead to the main page.

2. The design is just… bad.
Not so much from a standpoint of whether or not I like the design, but that it’s not necessarily compatible with all machines. For instance, here’s what it looks like on my laptop:

What is with that? Shouldn’t the design be fluid? Now granted, that’s a 1288px width, but they should at least center it if they’re going to make it fixed for 800×600. Even in 1024×768 it looks like crap.

Also, there are many bugs in the design such as the drop down menus going behind whatever graphic happens to be right below them so that you can’t get to the bottom menu items, things not fitting in the defined space and overflowing in strange patterns, common occurrances of errors (something about a directive not found), and many links opening in new windows for no reason whatsoever, etc.

3. I am routinely logged out.
The very first thing I do is log into the site. Then I may browse a few pages looking for what I need and before long, it’s logged me out, and I have to start all over again. This has made it extremely hard to ever email support. I’ll log in and get to the support page and then it wants me to log in again, doing that returns me to the main page. Go back, and try to email support, and have to go through the whole thing all over again.

4. Adding anything to my plan is near impossible.
I had to add Steve a text messaging plan for his phone. (First of all, it’s completely stupid that I have to do this per phoneline and not the whole package like the minutes are.) So I finally find what I need and start filling out the form. They want to know what package I want, my first name, my last name, what phone number it should be applied to, last four digits of my social security number, my zip code, and email address. That’s all basic, easy information – for me, right? It keeps some idiot who hacked my account from adding stuff to my plan. Great. Only the stupid thing kept telling me that the first name does not match that on the account. Um, hello!? I know my first name. It was the first thing I learned to write. I know how to spell my first name. After several tries, I figured it out. It went through when I put in my first name, a space, and my middle initial. Sheesh.

Finally, though it’s not website-related, so much, here’s another Cingular rant. Apparently if you are shopping for ringtones on your phone and you preview it, you are automatically charged for the whole thing. Sheila has been doing shopping on her phone the whole time she’s had it. And while she knew she was going to get charged for the internet usage, she didn’t know it was going to charge her for previewing it either because this is a new thing or because they didn’t charge her for that the first several months. From May, I told her she’d had six ringtones on her number and she freaked saying she hadn’t downloaded any. When I called, they told me you get charged for previewing and that there were nine coming up on the next bill. You figure the cost, that’s $2.49 each plus any internet usage. They were supposed to credit us half of the nine, but so far I have yet to see that. I think that is completely rediculous, because, in her words, she previewed to find out she didn’t like the tone. Why should we be billed for that?

Again, if Cingular wasn’t the only company that could guarantee us service in our area…

Doh!!

Did watch The Terminal tonight. I must describe it as “delightful.” I’ve never described a movie as “delightful” before. Steve enjoyed it as well.

—–

Wednesday I will kill three birds with one stone, maybe four if I’m lucky.

Plan to travel south to take my laptop in to Best Buy. I hate Best Buy. I hate Compaq. I hate my stupid Compaq laptop’s non-working CD rom.

Plan to drop by Cingular where we got phones in November for my father-in-law and my sister-in-law. They are charging us activation fees for each after we were led to believe they would be waived. Sheila is going with me as my witness since she was there when we got the phones. My cell phone bill this month is higher than it’s ever been at a few pennies shy of $200. I hate Cingular. This is reason #789723 that I hate Cingular. If only they weren’t all we could get in our area…

And then we will photograph my brother, sister-in-law, and new niece. She called me tonight and asked me to take some family photos for them… and soon.

That means I have to buy a new tripod as when I did school pictures for siblings last I apparently lost a very important part of it.

Also plan to do more Christmas shopping. Have only left Sheila, their two grandmothers, and my mom, dad, and sister. Oh yeah, and need to get something for the gift exchange with my dad’s family. A new thing we are trying this year.

—–

Short end of the stick?
When Sarah posted about our deal we had, Owen said she was getting “the short end of the stick.” I beg to differ. I promised her that if she worked one day out of every craft fair I had this fall (five) that I would take her to Chucke Cheese. She picked the place.
Two Saturdays ago Steve and I took her and Elijah out. What a mistake. My kid was such a crabby little boy. Well, he did enjoy himself towards the end of the evening while running around in the toddler’s area.

I think Sarah mentioned that after my Spring shows she’d like to go to Johnson Shut-ins. That or Six Flags, I’m told.

—–

Christmas play at church was this past week/weekend. It ran for five nights. Five freaking nights. They wanted us to tape all nights. I did three of them. Doing last night, Sunday, however, earned me the opportunity to get Christmas Day off. So, yay.

We did pretty good though. I wish we had our DVD recorder going there so that I could show you all the totally cool thing I did. Though it would have been better if Cameraman #2 could hear me better and had continued pulling out instead of pausing twice, it was still nice. As he pulled out, I faded from Camera #3 that had this extreme close-up on the soloist from the side. So she became this faint image on the screen in blackness that surrounded smaller versions of her and another character. It was nice. Similar to what I did on Easter.

—–

I forgot what else…

Okay, so they send me a thing that says “WELCOME! You are now part of the ALLOVER network…” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to thank me for getting a second line with them, my phone is eligible for a free ringtone*!

Note that *.

I picked out my ringtone last night… Spoken For, of course. :) And I went to check out and it told me insufficient funds for my coupon. I look at the fine print on the website, my free ringtone is only valid up to $1.99, music tones are $2.49.

What is up with that!?!?

Now, I’m not squabbling over 50¢, mind you. It’s just the principle of the thing. Another 50¢ and they can’t reward their new customers with that? I mean, c’mon, how much money are we giving them each month?

That’s just dumb.

I hate fine print.

And I still hate Cingular.

My fine print: To all you people who come here with search terms like “I hate Cingular” and “Cingular Sucks” (and believe me, I get those a lot), I just want to clarify something: I am only with Cingular because they’re all we can get in our area!!! :P

Well… I ended up going with Good Charlotte’s I Just Want to Live.

All the “Why I Hate Cingular” posts:
Why I hate Cingular
Why I hate Cingular II
Why I hate Cingular III
Why I hate Cingular IV
Why I hate Cingular V

On Saturday we went into two Cingular stores, the first is strictly a Cingular store and the second is the booth in Sam’s in St. Louis that also does T-Mobile and Sprint.

At the first store, we walked in and this guy was all smiles. Really loudly, he asked how he could help us. I said, quietly, “actually, we are here to complain.” Immediately his demeanor changed and he proceeded to be rude and short with us the rest of our time there.

When I explained what our problems were, I didn’t even have a chance to finish and he started telling me that because we were once ATT we now have to “upgrade” our phone to work with Cingular and that to do this we have to buy a new plan (that costs more money, of course) and pay all these crazy set up fees and buy the phone. I’m thinking, “no way.”

He proceeds to show us phones that we really can’t afford and when Steve asks him which phone has the best reception, he says definitly to the cheap Nokia. Steve’s like, “no, seriously, which one?” And he’s trying to be silly/fun about it, but the guy just keeps staring at us. We have had nothing but problems with Nokia in the past which is why we don’t have one now.

Finally we leave and agree to go into Sam’s after the anniversary party.

The guy there was not only much more friendly, but he was also somewhat helpful. He explained things to us better and told us to keep calling and complaining directly to Cingular because he was sorry he couldn’t do anything for us. He said maybe if we complain enough we can at least get all the rediculous set-up fees waived.

So Steve called Cingular yesterday and talked to someone for a long time. Basically she said the same things. However, they kind of contradict themselves by saying that we’re not under contract (although they won’t come right out and say that) and then they say that we are under contract until August 2006. They say early disconnect costs something like $176. That’s just stupid. If I want to disconnect my electric and I called the company and told them to do it, they’d do it either immediately or at the end of the billing period. Early disconnect fee my hiney. That’s just stupid.

So, basically what Cingular says is:

1. We have a phone that doesn’t work so well with their towers because it came from ATT that we need to upgrade it.

I say that is stupid because supposedly Cingular has just gone to this GSM, right? ATT was already GSM when I got it.

2. They say that we need to renew our contract for 2 years to upgrade our plan and that to get decent service we have to upgrade our plan.

This is dumb. Why can’t we just upgrade and keep our contract like it is?

3. They say we have to buy new phones.

This ticks me off. Why should I have to buy a new phone because they’re stupid? Why should I have to spend money I don’t have when my current phone is just fine and dandy in itself?

4. They say that if we upgrade, we have to pay this upgrade fee.

This also really ticks me off. Again, why should we have to pay more money for their idiocy? It’s not like we asked for our service to go to crap and they certainly didn’t send out any notices that our service would go to crap. No, they just merge and wait for everyone to become unsatisfied. Then when their customers complain, they try to get more money out of them.

To me, this is all dishonest and now I feel I am between a rock and a hard place. I want to get rid of Cingular but apparently any time I do that they go and buy the company I’m with. Also I am looking into other companies and it looks like Cingular and Sprint are the only ones that offer service around here and I remember when my brother-in-law had Sprint here it was just bad. Bad and more expensive. Verizon apparently skips our county for service, St. Louis has it and counties south of here have it. Nextel won’t show me where the service is, but says it’s not available in my zip code. And I don’t want to get rid of the cell phone completely because I know that as soon as I do, I’ll be by myself and break down or something. Plus, there’s the early disconnect fee which is again, just stupid. I told Steve cancel it and then I’ll refuse to pay the disconnect fee, what are they going to do, keep giving us service until we pay it? :lol:

Hello, Cingular, is anyone out there paying any attention? You’d better get your act together before you really start losing money as I’m finding more and more people all the time that you’ve pissed off. You’re getting to dang big for your britches, that’s what.

Anyone out there wanna draft an email letter to Cingular for me? Hehe, I can’t seem to keep my thoughts together but I really want to tell them off…

All the “Why I Hate Cingular” posts:
Why I hate Cingular
Why I hate Cingular II
Why I hate Cingular III
Why I hate Cingular IV
Why I hate Cingular V

Obviously, I still haven’t had a chance to go in and yell at them, but I am thinking maybe I can do this today as I have some other things that need to get done, too.

This time I hate them because their website freaking sucks! Of course, it has always sucked. I also hate them because they can’t assign a freaking due date to a bill.

The bills come as “DUE UPON RECEIPT.”

Um, sorry, no.

Some of us have to manage out finaces dependent upon what date the bills are due. So every month I have to look back to the previous month and see if it’s been a month yet since we paid the Cingular bill. Apparently last month, we paid it a couple of days “late” and so they tacked on last month’s bill to this month’s (how can it be late if there’s no stinking due date!?). But I did pay it, on the 16th. Today is the 15th and I log in to pay this month’s and it still says we owe for both months. I pay this month’s and it still says we owe for last month’s. AND because of this, the website won’t even let me look at other rate plans because it says that past due accounts are not eligible for rate changes.

Um, hello, we are not past due, number one, and number two I wouldn’t make a plan change online anyway, I just want to look!

I can’t wait to get out of this contract, but I have a feeling we have another whole year to go once we hit August…

[EDIT] Oh, crap. Apparently Cingular is kind of right. From what I can tell, I did pay the bill but there must have been some error or something. I deducted it from my checkbook register but it was never deducted from our checking account or credited to Cingular. Now I am confused. This sucks. Oh well, I still hate them.

[EDIT AGAIN] So we’re all paid up now, I think I’ve gotten it figured out. However, even though Cingular now shows us as having a $0.00 balance, it still won’t let me look at other plans, saying we’re past due. Blah

All the “Why I Hate Cingular” posts:
Why I hate Cingular
Why I hate Cingular II
Why I hate Cingular III
Why I hate Cingular IV
Why I hate Cingular V