Verizon Sent Me the Wrong Phone
On Wednesday, April 28, my Motorola Droid broke (the second time). A piece inside the microUSB port fell out while unplugging my phone, leaving the phone un-chargeable unless put in an odd position at an angle: not fun. No problem though, right? I’m still under warranty. Sure enough, Verizon was nice enough to send me a replacement phone, overnight, free of charge. Awesome! It shipped out April 29 and I got it on the 30th.
When the phone arrived I went through the fairly standard procedure: wipe data from old phone, keep battery/card/back-cover, install them in new phone and activate by dialing *228. In a few minutes after waiting on crappy activation music, it was done. My phone instantly picked up a signal and I went on my merry way packaging up the old phone to send back.
I started to notice some weird things that night though. The first was that I was told I had to dial the area code while ‘roaming’. This was weird, but I figured dialing *22899 to refresh the cell tower data would fix it. No luck though. Oh well– it’ll sort itself out. Then I started getting messages from my friends asking why I wasn’t answering my phone. I decided to run an experiment by calling my home phone from my cell. The caller ID showed up as a 410 area code (Maryland). It was bidirectional too, meaning my phone rang when I called the Maryland number. My old local number went straight to voicemail.
I called up Verizon and told them about the issue, and the rep I had was very confused by the situation. I was put on hold a couple times and told that he would have to converse with a higher-up. Verizon claims that they can’t program the phone remotely to my correct number and decide to ship me yet another new phone, same as last time. Meanwhile, I have no access to my old number and some poor soul in Maryland probably wants their number back. I can make and receive calls on this Maryland number, and Verizon recognizes me as the person on that account. Luckily though, it was secure enough such that I couldn’t make any account changes without the social security number.
The new (Droid #4) phone is set to arrive tomorrow, and hopefully it’ll work just fine. I’ll have 3 Droids in the house then… but I have to send 2 of them back via prepaid FedEx.