After Jett’s death almost 3 years ago I kept her phone on my T-Mobile account. It was used to communicate with my printer (silly), as a backup hotspot (occasionally useful) and (mainly) because I was on a 55+ discount plan that required 2 lines. But Marlene needed to change her plan and it made sense to swap out Jett’s phone (which I discovered was bulging and was probably on its last legs anyway) and add hers. Simple, right? Well, not so much.

First I went to the T-Mobile store to find out what I would need to do to swap the lines. Marlene was on Metro, which is now a T-Mobile subsidiary, and her phone was already unlocked, so they said all that was needed was to call Metro and get a “Transfer PIN”. Sounded simple. Even simpler when we discovered that the PIN could be obtained online via the Metro website. So, armed with the PIN we went to the T-Mobile store. About 10 minutes there and we walked out with a phone that had been switched over to T-Mobile.

Or so we thought.

The process wasn’t quite complete as the store was unable to drop Jett’s line; I would have to call T-Mobile to make that happen. No problem. I would do that when I got home.

About 10 minutes after leaving the store I received a call, on my line, from T-Mobile “customer service” (the phrase seems wildly inappropriate now). He said he needed to complete the transfer. Huh? I was just told, in the store, that the transfer was complete and the salesperson there had even placed a call from Marlene’s phone to prove it. Her internet access was also working fine. What that salesperson DIDN’T test was the ability of her phone to receive calls and text. They were not working.

So what needed to be done? He said he needed her Metro account number to complete the process. Well, this was contrary to what I had been told initially – that the Transfer PIN was all that was required. I tried to reason, saying that the PIN was from her account and surely they could get the account from that. And why was the account number needed? He said that the account number we had provided was incorrect.

Huh? we had never provided an account number. I finally extracted the fact that the bad account number was “in their system.” Apparently this is the T-Mobile system, not the Metro system which obviously had the right account number as they had been billing Marlene for 10 years.

Annoying. Apparently, it was my responsibility to fix their problem.

Well, we were out doing errands and did not have the account number with us. I tried to access her account online but it tried to send a text message to her phone to verify her identity and, of course, the text message was not received. Catch-22 – need the account number to receive text messages, need the text message to get the account number. He got a Metro person on the line but she, too, had to send a text message to verify her identity. Same problem. OK, just answer some “simple” questions, such as “in which month did you activate your phone?” You must be kiddiing – that was 10 years ago! We took a wild guess and said “July”. Wrong. So the “service” person said she needed to go to a Metro store, show her ID, and they would give her the account number. There was a Metro store just a half mile away so we went there. And learned that they couldn’t access her account “because the system T-Mobile provided us is locked”. That was said with a bit of animosity. Apparently this T-Mobile/Metro merger is not without its problems.

A business that is unable to access its customer accounts? Unbelievable.

Back to the T-Mobile store. We got a supervisor who listened to our horror story and managed to fix it all in about 5 minutes. Without the account number.

Don’t ask me why this couldn’t have been done on the first visit. I guess they wanted us to experience the joy of T-Mobile/Metro customer service.

That gave us a working phone for Marlene. All that remained was dropping Jett’s line, which I was told required another call to T-Mobile. I placed that call about 15 minutes after leaving the store. The line was dropped. But I was informed that my bill for this month would be higher because I had “added a line.” Whoa, I said. I didn’t ADD a line, I SWAPPED a line. But they were adamant that I had to pay more because I had added the line first, with the implication that I had done something wrong. I protested that I had been given no other option and insisted on speaking to a supervisor. After a 5-minute wait on hold she returned and said “I see what you SHOULD have done” (again implying that it was my fault). But I didn’t care whose fault it was so long as the billing problem was fixed. It was. So, to confirm that everything was correct I asked what my bill would be. She said $80. That was a surprise as my monthly bill had been $95 and I had added a $5 option so I was expecting $100. I mentioned this and she looked at my account and said, no, it will be $80.

I wasn’t going to argue about a surprise $20 per month saving. But I have this gnawing feeling that somehow something in my account has been messed up.

After this horrible experience why would I think otherwise?