You might recall a previous entry in which I furiously scribbled my distaste for things that don’t work as advertised. Let me amend this to note that it’s especially maddening if said deficiency is beyond my ability to influence or affect, frustrating me almost past the utilization of coherent and indelible word structure usements.
To prove that the Tiny Gods o’ Technoware have a cock walloping sense of humor, they have bestowed upon me a phone which underscores the suckliciousness of things that don’t work properly. The Samsung U706, or the Muse, as it’s called on a network that shall remain nameless but which still makes me want to slip hot daggers into my eyes, not only underscores this principle but smacks it in the chops and scrawls nasty things about its mother on various bathroom walls.
Buying a phone is a little like buying a car; you never really know if you’re going to like it until you’ve lived with it for a while, as some of the most brain-liquefying tendencies often don’t show up until after several days or weeks together. Occasionally you run into a phone that seems to have all its geese on a leash; solid construction, good sound, impressive features, strong reception, and then you get it home only to discover that hey, it’s the fucking Devil.
Not an imp. Not some peon necromancer with misguided aspirations. Not even a mildly ambitious yet cautiously circumspect Tourette’s-afflicted Balrog.
The fucking Devil. In your phone. Grrr. Argh.
This time I can’t even blame the phone. The Samsung Muse, a CDMA handset, seems like a pretty solid customer; CDMA being where Samsung shines and all. This time the fault likes squarely on the shoulders of BubbaNet, the brain-dead twits who threw an old TV antenna across a chain-link fence and called it a wireless network, and to whom I keep giving money because I’m something of a brain-dead twit myself. Why can’t I quit you, BubbaNet? Man.
See, for whatever reason, my Muse won’t receive off-network text messages. This means that if you use AT&T, or Sprint, or T-Mobile, or Verizon, or Claro, or Orange, or Vodafone, or any network in the world other than BubbaNet, I won’t get your text. You’ll get mine, but I won’t get yours unless you possess the same pissing-on-your-own-forehead consumer judgment that I do. I know this because I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with tech support; the first tech I spoke to was dumber than peas, a guy who wanted to get me off the phone as quickly as possible and who succeeded thanks to his Star Wars: A New Hope Bullshit Re-Release Special Edition Death Star explosion of indifference, complete with shockwave ring. The second, a woman, listened to my problem, understood it, was very polite and personable, and thoroughly investigated the myriad possibilities before uttering those dreaded words:
Trouble ticket.
Insert Charlie Brown’s cry of dismay here at the temerity of those football-yanking weasels. “Trouble ticket” is corporate tech-supportese for “we’re going to ignore your problem until you go away.” It means that they’ve bought my trouble a friggin’ ticket on the next space shuttle, and they’re going to launch that bastard into deep, deep space where no one will ever see it again unless they have a revolving line of credit at Breeb’lak’s House of Anal Probes. Nothing, and by nothing I mean nothing in the history of the world, has ever been resolved once a trouble ticket has been opened.
Tower of Pisa? Trouble ticket. Still open.
Liberty Bell? You guessed it.
Great Sphinx? Probably the first.
It’s not that tech support was uniformly useless; the second person I talked to was very willing, very eager to solve my problem, though she was effectively stymied by BubbaNet’s policy of not actually providing any kind of useful service whatsoever. She didn’t attribute my difficulties to user error, or to the “other networks” (all of which work fine with each other, yet somehow it’s their fault when they can’t communicate with BubbaNet’s System o’ Shittiness). First tech, I’m looking at you, here. Dickface.
So now I wait. I wait for a call that won’t come. I wait like some pathetic, acne-cratered unwashed slob waits for that first fumbling encounter with a girl he didn’t meet at a family get-together, and then I go grumbling back, complete with cartoon cloud overhead, to BubbaNet’s local brick-and-mortar cesspit and try to finagle some sort of resolution to this ass-bending conundrum.
Maybe next time I’ll just pay someone to kick me in the crotch.
Updated on May 2, later; The kind but clueless folks at BubbaNet’s retail store managed to resolve my text messaging issue after I suggested changing the phone number, which was in turn suggested to me last night by Almost Helpful Tech #2. It seems that the problem was in their recent deployment of of new local exchanges that completely befuddled every network but their own. And I, of course, had received one of the new numbers. Not anymore.
Still no callback on the phantom trouble ticket that’s floating around out in the ether. Maybe I’ll hear from them by the time the current technology goes obsolete, but I’m not holding my breath.
