T-mobile is putting me on tilt

Sorry folks but I'm on mad tilt right now and really need to vent.

I just got off the phone with T-Mobile and it seems like they've essentially screwed me out of $150 bucks.

Last Monday I ordered the Sidekick 08 from t-mobile.com which was an upgrade from my previous phone, the Sidekick 3. I went ahead and got a two year extension on my contract as well to get the phone for $149.99 as opposed to the retail price of $299.99.

Okay so I got the phone yesterday and I figured it was going to be as simple as popping in the SIM card from my old phone into the new one.

Not quite.

For some reason the phone would not get any signal and it took me to a screen that said I had to wait 24 hours for the data services (AIM, Internet etc.) to work properly but that I should still be able to make calls and send texts.

Well when I tried placing calls a message would read "Hardware Problem" or something like that. But this was last night and I was at work so I could not call t-mobile to see what was up.
So I called t-mobile up a few minutes ago and explained the problem.

Lady said a simple phone reset should fix it. So I reset the phone and still nothing. I would get a signal for like the first 30 seconds the phone was booted up and then it would disappear. So she had me try a bunch of other stuff including testing my SIM card on another phone to see if that was the problem.

The SIM card worked great on my sister's phone so it was deemed that the Sidekick was the one at fault. Okay at this point, am I crazy for thinking that the most straight forward and logical solution would be for me to send the phone back and have them send me a new one?

I guess not. Apparently since I didn't purchase insurance on the phone, they can't do anything about it. No money back no nothing. I'm stuck with a phone that was SHIPPED already broken and I'm liable for it.

Okay hold on. I'm going to put this post on pause for a minute and take a drive down to the t-mobile store since I'm guessing they're already open by now.


to be continued in a few minutes...

Alright, I'm back and things seemed to be worked out now I guess. But first let's go back to the original phone call to t-mobile earlier this morning. So the lady keeps insisting that there's nothing I can do and basically t-mobile isn't responsible for the defective phone.

WTF? Seriously?

She's putting me on mad tilt at this point so I hang up on her and then decided to drive down to the t-mobile store. Some dude checks the phone out and checks SIM card and what not basically doing all the stuff the lady made me do over the phone. He says the phone is defective but that I can just call t-mobile back and they should send me a new phone regardless if I have insurance on it or not.

So I come back home and call t-mobile again and finally start talking to someone with a bit of brains. She's super cool about it and tells that I can in fact get a new phone because the one they sent me was a defective model (I don't know what the earlier rep I was talking to was smoking.)

So I just got back from the UPS store where I shipped the defective phone back and I should be getting a new one sometime next week. Why this wasn't the first thing that was proposed when I called is beyond me but whatever.

It still sucks that I'm going to be without a phone for a week though (I sold my Sidekick 3 yesterday) but I think I can get a loaner phone from the t-mobile store til mine arrives.

So, that's been my morning basically. 3 phone calls to t-mobile, a trip to the t-mobile store and another trip to the UPS store. Oh yea and I haven't slept all night and gotta be at work in 3 hours. Yay me and my crappy Friday morning!