60 calendar days (41 business days) after I ordered my first Sidekick II and eight increasingly angry calls later, T-Mobile finally credited me for the cost of the phone that was not delivered but applied to my bill.

Last night, after some sustained screaming that had my wife retreating to the bedroom with our baby, I finally got past the front line customer rep and a supervisor to get the attention of a manager who cleared my screwed up billing in a few hours. After paying the remaining small balance online, my account is blessedly at $0.00.

What I learned from dealing with 16 different T-Mobile call center people:

• YOU the customer will have to drive the issue resolution process because no one ever calls you back or is held accountable for following up behind the scenes.
• Reps will lie to get you off the phone.
• You have to scream to get past the poorly-trained front line reps to at least a supervisor before they will reference your complete call history.
• You will never talk to the same person twice because there are 900 reps in 32 call centers, and you can't request to speak to a specific staff person even though they all recite their first name and employee ID number.
• Take detailed notes throughout because some of the reps don't know how to access the full call log and will claim no knowledge of previous promises.

In contrast to the T-Mobile Call Center Victimization, I ordered a Sidekick II from Amazon during this time, and processed an exchange online with them without ever needing to make a phone call.

Anyway, I hope my bullet points are of help to someone out there. Moving forward, since I work at a powerful lobbying organization, I'm going to contribute anything I can to our growing battle with cell phone carriers. One day they will be slapped down. Hard.

- mike lee - washington, dc