I couldn’t believe what I was reading in the New York Times. A major cell phone carrier was doing away with the 2-year contract? They were going to subsidize the cost of the phone only until you paid it off, and then you quit paying for it? With zero interest? You can leave at any time, change phones at any time, and they’ll unlock the phone for you so you can travel?
But wait . . . the best is yet to come. Someone is finally doing away with the ten minutes of instructions you get whenever you call a friend and get their voicemail. You know, you can press * to leave a callback number (don’t we all have call waiting by now?), or press 1 for more options, or listen for the beep, or oh-my-god-we-have-to-treat-every-caller-like-they’ve-never-called-anyone-before-in-their-lives . . . just-in-case.
Yeah, T-Mobile is going straight to the beep. Granted, as they say in the article, it’s easy to upheave an industry when you’re at the bottom. But still, I decided to reward these business decisions by taking my business elsewhere. Goodbye sucky carrier of old, I’m now with T-Mobile. And while I was worried about reception in my house (my sucky carrier gave me half a bar at home, dropped calls, and wouldn’t send me a tower to fix the problem), my new buddy at T-Mobile actually hops onto my WiFi for my calls, giving me perfect reception! (Like that $200 tower . . . but free).
It feels good to reward excellent business practices. It would be even better if everyone else on the planet jumped ship with me. Not because it would force the rest of the sucky carriers to treat us like human beings, but because I would never again have to listen to some voice tell me what to do after the beep. Just get me to the part where I leave a message. Not that anyone listens to them, of course. They just ring me back and say, “Hey, did you just call me?”
At least, that’s what I do.
25 replies to “Thank you, T-Mobile”