Typically, I don't even weigh in on this stuff. I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a barren landscape of shitty customer service and virtual assistants. I still recall sort of fondly back in the 1990s when everyone already had a cell phone but I still held out. I finally caved in my late 20s for one of those flip phones, and ironically T-Mobile was one of the first carriers that I worked with. Then I upgraded to one of those Sidekick phones and it was glorious. Those days are long gone.

So the simple backstory is just that I was needing to move my cell phone service to a new carrier, and I was doing some research around who has the best coverage in my area. If you look at the coverage maps, T-Mobile does a great job with 5G and they seem to have some decent plans, so I called them yesterday to see if I could set up a new account. It took over an hour to get anything done with the sales agent, who kept on trying to give me a certain code to unlock one of the discounts he had promised me. After trying three different codes with the same error message, and he said you know, let me just call you back tomorrow cause I'm already at the end of my shift. Fair enough. Today and came and went with no phone call from him, so I decided to get in touch with T-Mobile service to just cancel the whole affair. At one point I did give him some credit card information, so I didn't want that to be just out there as an open credit authorization. I thought it would be simple enough to just ask them to cancel the application. That turned out to be very very wrong. I am attaching some screenshots of the text exchange as an example of the kind of ridiculousness I just subject myself to today. Never again. If anyone tries to rope you into a relationship with T-Mobile, do yourself a favor and run away as quickly as possible.

I work with technology every day. I understand completely that customer service is hard, but there is absolutely no excuse for the fact that over the last two days I've spent somewhere between two and three hours accomplishing absolutely nothing with T-Mobile support.

I have to say, with all due respect, working with T-Mobile support has been the single most frustrating experience I've had in recent years. And I work with technology every day. I am absolutely speechless. Right now I'm going to log off and cry myself to sleep. I guess if I see any charges from T-Mobile I will just have to lawyer up and call it a day.

What was the final verdict, you may ask?

After spending something close to six hours on the phone, and another 9 hours all in for two separate drives to Syracuse that I had to put in to close this chapter in my life, I can say it cost me almost $200 and 15 hours of my life to no longer have a relationship with T-Mobile. Never again.

If, God, help you, you are already in a relationship with T-Mobile, all I can say is I hope you live near one of their 'corporate' locations, and if anyone ever mentioned something about a security pin, ask them if there is any other way to authenticate, because I think what happened is that a pin was set on my account something like 10 years ago, and the more recent sales person found that account and linked it to my request without authenticating the pin that obviously I didn't have 10 years later. So just don't ever set a PIN, I would opt for the text message or even a phone call before setting a pin. Because they have absolutely no way to recover that PIN once it is set.