Finally. It took one month, 46 email messages, and two visits to the store to resolve a problem with my Sidekick II. The solution wasn’t complicated, but I can’t honestly say it would’ve worked had I not got a new SIM card.

SMS (short message service) had not been working for months, but I didn’t notice because I rarely sent SMS messages. A friend of mine tried to send me one when we were meeting, but I never got it. I tried sending her a test message and it never went through. So I sent one to Paul who also has a Sidekick II with the same service and it timed out.

I used to get an SMS with the question of the day and that’s what clued me in that I had not received one for months. I thought I had unsubscribed to the service, but it started coming back as soon as SMS worked again.

I emailed T-Mobile about the problem as I figured we could solve it by email and save a trip to the store. The techs (I worked with multiple techs) had me do different things like check the network, manually scan the network, and change the phone number to the service. Nothing worked.

The emails were annoying. Every single one started with major sucking up and yadda yadda about commitment to resolving my problem and how they valued me. I’ve copied and pasted some phrases so you can see they’re overdoing it especially when almost every one of those 46 emails had the same sickeningly sweet phrase.

So they suggested I go to the store and test the SIM card. The store I went to couldn’t do that, so the staff replaced the SIM card and said it would take up to 24 hours to kick in.

Two days passed… I went out of town… came back and almost a week passed and it was not working. I started emailing the service again and it was taking too long to resolve, so I went to the store on Monday. The SIM card number was incorrectly entered into the system. When the staff tried to correct the number, the system refused to take it.

Out with the new and in with another new SIM card. The Sidekick II worked immediately. Still no SMS, though. Everything else was working again. So it was back to square one when all this started. I exchanged a few emails with the techs and finally, we resolved it by deselecting one of the options.

The question of the day started arriving again. I sent SMSes without any problems. Huzzah! 46 emails and one month to break the device, get it working, and fix the original problem.

[tags]Sidekick,telecommunications,sms,Meryl K. EVans[/tags]