An Itty Bitty Rant

I found a lovely waterproof jacket and pants at Costco for cheap, so now I can leave the apartment again, walk, and not worry about flooding the iPod. Although because all the really nice waterproof weather wear were for men, it fits strange and snug around the hips, but I can live with that when it means freedom. Terrible, terrible freedom. In addition, I bought a pair of fleece gloves. It seems I am a delicate flower who shivers for five minutes when leaving a warm interior for a cold exterior. This is new to me, this cold feeling. I must take arms against it.

In truth I'd prefer to play Warcraft right now, but the servers are down for maintenance -- like they are every Tuesday morning -- until 11am. I guess I'll have to face reality for a little while longer...

The good news is that it's raining. I get to test out my rainwear and make that $30 work for me!

You know Cingular is sneaky. When they gobbled up AT&T, they made it sound like you'd be able to keep the same services for the same prices and that there wouldn't be too many changes. When I moved here they did a national transfer on my phone number so I could keep the same account and have a local number, but a side effect was that I lost all my AT&T perks, like long distance. Don't you think that's strange? I sure did. Especially when that wasn't made clear and I had to pay $18 for an hour phone call to my mother in California during the unlimited night/weekend time slot, which I retained, but with no long distance who needs unlimited night/weekend? They said that because I moved out of my initial calling area, all those things they promised me before were null and void. I accepted it.

So to switch over to Cingular -- I was technically an AT&T customer even though they were strongarming me out of my contract -- I had to buy a new phone. My old phone said AT&T on it. I guess that affects billing or something. Also, they no longer offer the $29.99/month plan. The lowest starts at $39.99/month for individuals and that's too damn much to carry a hunk of plastic around.

Luckily I'd done a little research and went to the Cingular store armed...with knowledge. After two trips, and them only showing me more expensive plans and phones, I signed up for a family plan with Jer and got a free phone that's almost exactly the same as the one I'd been using, only with crummier graphics. It's $69.99/month for the both us, so we save a tiny bit.

And the kicker was that after doing the national transfer, my snazzy new local phone number was associated with someone else's name. They couldn't pull me up on their computers. I didn't exist. Although the bill comes fine to my house every month. I don't even know how that could have happened... but everytime I deal with Cingular they spend five minutes trying to interpret the information on their computer screens because it never jives with reality. There's something funky about the way they integrated the AT&T databases and only some stores have access to the AT&T information and other stores just throw up their hands and sigh.

It should all be straightened out now, but then, it took half of our Sunday we'll never get back. The end.