In Focus

The old adages “It’s too good to be true” and “You get what you pay for” became painfully real for me over the course of an irritating week.

In an attempt to save money, I started shopping around for a different cellphone plan. I had been with the same carrier for 15 years without any major issues—except for the price. Looking into alternatives, I came across a prepaid service that seemed too good to be true. Let’s call them BS Mobile.

The plan claimed to cover my area and was significantly cheaper than what I was paying. A few friends in town had it and raved about it. Seemed like a good deal, so I made the switch. The first day, everything seemed fine. But by the second day, I was texting my boyfriend when suddenly my messages were blocked. Confused, we both checked our settings—nothing seemed off. Then I noticed my phone displayed “Emergency Calls Only.”

I reached out to BS Mobile and found out they were experiencing an outage. I was annoyed, but outages happen. At least I had WiFi.

The next day, I stopped at a gas station and tried to look up directions. Despite having a full signal, my phone refused to work. I needed WiFi just to use GPS. It was very frustrating!

The following day, my phone was back to “Emergency Calls Only.” Clearly, this service wasn’t worth a darn, and it wasn’t going to cut it as I need it for work.

That night, I went to a retailer to see if the issue was my phone. It wasn’t. I learned that BS Mobile only used 30% of the available towers on the network they relied on and severely throttled back service. That explained a lot. I had enough! I was switching back to my original carrier.

The retailer helped me start the process of getting my number back and reinstating my service. After three hours, they told me they had done all they could and that I needed to go to a corporate store to complete the transfer. Oh great! At least the timing worked out good since I had to go to Brainerd the next day for my infusion. So I went home with zero phone service, relying solely on WiFi. Honestly, I didn’t hate the idea—a break from constant calls and messages was nice.

After my infusion, I stopped at my carrier’s corporate store and explained the situation. I had all the necessary information for transferring my number back, but BS Mobile had never completed the process. Another three hours later, I finally had my number back, but my service wouldn’t be fully active for up to 72 hours. Oh yay!

For the next two days, I could only text people with the same carrier. Nobody could call me. I restarted my phone daily, even leaving it off for a while. But nothing changed. Life got busy, and I didn’t have time for another grueling three-hour customer service call, so a full week passed with no improvement.

Finally, I called my carrier again, explaining that I still had no service. The representative assured me that transfers could take up to 72 hours. I told her it had been a week.

“What!? That is not going to fly. Hold on.”

Within 20 minutes, she had my phone fully working again. I have no idea what kind of magic she performed that no other reps could seem to manage, but I was finally back in business.

Lesson learned: I get what I pay for, and I won’t be making this mistake again.