For a while now, I’ve needed a new phone. My old phone was stable, and it worked, but it was getting older, and was pretty beat up, and quickly becoming out-dated. So I’ve been shopping around for a while, looking for deals, but have been hesitant to pull the trigger, until just recently.

A couple of weeks ago, while at work, one of my co-workers, Andre, pointed out a phone that he had found on Buy.com. It was a Motorola MPX220, and it was the same phone that he had. The phone had a retail price of $459, but Buy.com was selling it for $299.99, and including $300 dollars worth of rebates if the buyer would sign up for a two year agreement with Cingular. Since my service agreement with Sprint is month to month, and getting a phone of that quality for free was simply to good to pass up, I bought it. And that’s where everything that eventually went wrong over the last two weeks began.

I purchased the new phone on February 10th, and what happened after that was a series of blunders, mishaps and screwups that were so blatant they were seemingly intentional. It’s all funny to me now, but to appreciate my anger and frustration during the series of events that I’m about to describe, please remember that I’m planning to leave for Vermont on Monday, and my cell phone is the only phone that I have, and thus, vitally important to me for both business and personal reasons.

After a few small problems in processing my wireless service order with Cingular, my phone was finally shipped on February 17th, a week after I had purchasaed it. While I thought that odd, I didn’t worry too much, because I did have to answer a few questions for them wile they were processing my order. So it took a little longer than I thought it would, no big deal.

However, the next morning when I checked the tracking number for the phone, the real problems began. I noticed that the package had started in Maryland, and was now in Lexington, KY. In doing a lot of online purchasing, I know that Lexington is sort of a hub for UPS packages, sort of like Memphis would be for FedEx. As I watched it the rest of the day, I realized that it was going to my firm’s office in Jackson. I called our receptionist, to let her know that it would probably be there Monday morning, and to decide whether she should just receive the package and then send it to me, or whether she should refuse the package, so I could then have UPS reroute it. She asked the UPS delivery man this question when he dropped of the firm’s afternoon deliveries, and he said it would be easiest to refuse it, and then reroute it.

I didn’t think about the package all weekend, and on Monday morning I checked online to see the shipping information, and saw where it had already been refused by the receptionist. I called UPS and told them that I wanted the package rerouted to my home address. The woman that I spoke with at UPS proceeded to tell me that since the package had been refused, it was being sent back to the shipper, and that I would have to take it up with them and have them resend it to the correct address. At this point I was livid, because I had initially just wanted our receptionist to resend the package to me, but had decide to go the other route ON THE ADVICE OF SOMEONE FROM UPS. I yelled, I screamed (and those who know me know this is a big deal, I don’t ever do that) but the woman on the phone didn’t care, and I promptly hung up on her mid-sentence.

I called the wonderful help line at Buy.com next. Buy.com is one of those great companies that out sources all of their customer services to third world countries like India and Pakistan, and so I spent about 30 minutes describing my problem to someone who I couldn’t understand, and to someone who couldn’t understand me. Once she finally figured out what I was saying, she told me to call Buy.com’s wireless customer service line.

I could describe the call to the wireless customer service line now, but it would just really be easier for me to tell you to read the above paragraph one more time, and you’ll get the idea. She told me to call Buy.com’s regular customer service line. This went back and forth for about 2 hours, and finally someone with the wireless customer service line told me that they’d cancel my previous order, and reorder me the phone and ship it to the correct address.

At that point, Andre and I went to lunch. While at lunch, though, the Buy.com wireless customer service line called me back to tell me that they didn’t have my phone in stock, and so they would have to either wait until the phone was returned to ship it, or to send me another phone. I yelled a little bit more, and then told them I would call them back and let them know what to do a little later. All this was happening with me knowing that I had to have this phone by Monday, Feb. 28th (tomorrow), because I was leaving for Vermont.

When I got back from lunch I made one last desperate phone call to UPS. I was finally put in touch with someone who actually seemed to give a damn about helping a customer with their problem, and so a solution was reached. I was told that while they still would not be able to reroute my package, they would be able to send it back to it’s original destination. I told them to go ahead and do that.

My next move was to call my firm’s office again, and tell them to expect the package, and to accept it when it arrived. When I called, I found out that the normal receptionist had needed to leave early that afternoon, and wouldn’t be back. I said that was fine, and asked if they would accept the package, and send it to me the next day. They said that was fine. With that, I was done for the day.

I checked the tracking information the next morning (Tuesday, Feb. 22nd) and saw that the package had been received at the office. So I called to see if they had sent it to me yet. I found out that in actuality, the normal receptionist had arrived at the office that morning, seen the package, and, not being privy to the previous afternoons events, had refused it again, and sent it back with the UPS delivery man AGAIN. So I told her I would have it sent back, and to receive it and to send it to me when she did. She received the package, AGAIN, and sent it to me that afternoon. The package was sent overnight, and was waiting for me at Andre’s house when I got there on Wednesday morning. With that the whole ordeal was over.

Except that it wasn’t. As I opened the box, and went through the phone information, and the order summary, I noticed that I had been given a new number, a number with an area code that I didn’t recognize, instead of having my current number transferred with me. In summary, I had a phone, with service in Alexandria, Virginia, that was shipped to Jackson, Mississippi, and that was given a Peoria, Illinois phone number. This order couldn’t have been screwed up any worse if they had tried. After spending most of Wednesday on the phone with Cingular, trying to get the phone in working order, and by late afternoon, I had succeeded.

I’m always being presented with different deals or special offers by Andre or other coworkers or friends. “Hey, sign up for this service, you can get this deal”, someone will say. Or, “hey, they have a special offer on these, I know you said you had wanted to get one”, another person will say. I’m always hesitant about these things, and I always catch hell for it. Well, listen people, this shit is why. Things like this always happen to me, it never fails. So the next time you see some special deal or offer, and you think I might like it, and you think you should let me know about it, just don’t. I don’t want to fucking hear about it.

Let them screw with some other poor asshole. Thanks.