Well, the other day I pulled my 14 month old Droid 2 Global from my pocket, and found it powered off. That’s unusual. What was worse, it wouldn’t boot — I got a text bootloader screen telling me the battery was too low to load code. Not good. Figuring the battery had croaked, I ordered a new one ($3 or so eBay special). Unfortunately, it seems the problem runs deeper. The phone won’t charge the battery regardless of how I try it, and the new battery didn’t last long enough to load a firmware image from my PC. I believe the phone is now expensive scrap.
So off to the Verizon store I went. I’ll spare the details, but suffice it to say that I left there, as usual, with no working phone and a serious intent to just cancel ALL our Verizon service. Seriously, where do they find these worthless little retards? A call to their customer service line was a complete waste of time… I ended up finding out that their phone reps have to use a web site that sucks even worse than the consumer site (quite a tall order) and it’s actually cheaper to just use the web site. Sigh…
After wasting most of a day on this — well, more than a day, since I’d spent several hours on it before today — I have a new Droid 3 on the way, at zero cost, with a vehicle mount and the desk charging dock. I just had to go somewhere other than Verizon. I found a place on eBay with a killer upgrade deal, did a little research, found out they were legitimate and that, in fact, even NewEgg uses them. So I went through NewEgg, since I have more confidence in their ability and willingness to strong-arm a vendor if they don’t deliver.
Now, why I have to jump through so many hoops and do so much work for the exact same end result is beyond me. In the end I get a brand new Verizon phone, and a new extension of my existing Verizon service. Just like if I’d done it in 10 minutes at the Verizon store. The only difference is that NewEgg and the company they use are both making money — and Verizon isn’t. In fact, as far as I can tell Verizon is making a few hundred dollars less than if they’d just sold me the phone in the first place. It’s beyond stupid.
In the end I get a new phone, but I’m about 50% less satisfied with VZW than I was before. So much so, in fact, that I plan to see if I can get my phone to work on AT&T and T-Mobile networks (there is a way) so I can try out prepaid SIM cards from them and see if they suck less. Maybe, maybe not… but VZW has really gotten to be a pain in the ass to deal with.
On top of all this, we were supposed to fly today but it’s too damn cold. Oh well.