yonmei

11:18 pm: I WIN!
The last time I tried to recredit my Vodafone Pay As You Go account, I was told my card had expired.

I checked with my bank, and discovered to my unsurprise that Vodafone had got it wrong; my card was still perfectly valid.

So I tried to check with Vodafone what the problem was. I found that Vodafone had no means to let me do that:

( for length )

So that was the end of Vodafone for me. Well, at least until next time. I mean, all phone companies are garbage. But oh, the joy of PAYGO: to be able to just decide "screw you!" and go. (I transferred all my contacts across on Sunday in an Orange shop, before I rang Orange to port my number.)

And then I had a problem. I got a Nokia 1600 with a Vodafone SIM card last year in the aftermath of the 3 thing. And the Nokia turned out to be locked to Vodafone only: which I found when I inserted my Orange SIM card and got "SIM CARD NOT VALID".

But, solo put me on to a site called www.moneysavingexpert.com, and there was a subsection for unlocking mobile phones for free, so I tried a couple of the websites from there (unlock.nokiafree.org and www.unlockitfree.com) and found the second one had the clearer explanation so I went with the number one code from that website...
...and WHEE. It worked. My phone was unlocked. My Orange SIM card works.

I am wizard of my own phone. :-D



Tags: *bounce*, 3 are bastards, cool things people do with software, evil phone company plots, mobile phone blues

07:43 pm: Ah well...
I attempted to wring a new phone out of T-Mobile. Unfortunately, it didn't work, but it was worth a try.

I'd been looking at mobile phones and had been really struck by the Nokia 8600, which is a dream of a phone - no-scratch screen, titanium case, nice design. Price: £400. But no phone company is offering that as a free phone, so I thought I'd try and brace T-Mobile for it, on the basis that I'd been with them three years, my contract expired 18 months ago at least, and hey, if I didn't ask, I wouldn't get.

02 were prepared to offer a much better price plan and a free Nokia 6500 Classic. T-Mobile were prepared to match 02, but no better than that: they would happily have offered me more and more free minutes and texts, but I didn't need more free minutes, what I fancied, frankly, and I told the bloke at T-Mobile this, was a much better phone. The best he was allowed to offer (he said, not at all reluctantly) was a Nokia 8600 for £170. As the price difference between 8600 and 6400 is more like £145 (I looked up both models on Amazon) I asked him for a PACs code instead, and he gave me one. (I need to port my number over from old phone to new. I hate changing numbers.) I'd have bargained if he'd been able to bargain, but if the lowest he was allowed to go was £170, there was no point.

( letter to T-Mobile )

Tags: evil phone company plots