Thursday rambles: phones and me

It's been two years since I got my first smartphone, and my contract is up. The phone that so enamored me at first has revealed itself to be a piece of $hit mechanically: it freezes often and even spontaneously shuts off occasionally, which is not okay. I'd be perfectly happy with my S2 if it worked reliably, but it doesn't. I'm up for a newer model not because it's snazzier and newer, but because... it will more likely stay on and load $hit. And at this stage of my life and at this stage of what I pay for my phone, that phone had better load $hit.

So I started shopping. Did you know that smartphones are really f*ing expensive? Like, really f*ing expensive? WTF? Yeah, I know they're really pocket-computers, and I probably wouldn't mind if the people in China working on them got more of the spoils, but they're not, so I do mind.


But that's not the point. The (first) point, which I didn't know was the point until I talked to my coworker about this and she articulated it this way, is that companies misguidedly chase after new customers and don't bother to retain existing customers, perhaps counting on customer inertia and other such factors. This coworker's sister works for a company whose job it is to keep existing customers happy, and she (the sister) marvels at what an undervalued concept it is.

So I started shopping for a new phone, thinking that I could get a decent upgrade for a new two-year contract. Except that, go figure, AT&T wanted me to pay for a phone and sign up for a new contract. They were certainly offering new, free or heavily discounted phones to new customers, but since I was already a smartphone customer, AT&T's position was that I go f* myself. So I looked at some other carriers and sort-of liked what I saw at Verizon. I tried to figure out if I could get an employee discount at Verizon, and I sort of could, but they were really shady about it (you had to sign up for everything first and provide all of your information, and then they'd tell you what the discount was). And then their chat person misled me about what the discount was, and I got cold feet (I would be paying a bit more for less data, which was fine in practice because I never come near my data limit, but still).

Upon thinking about it some more, I decided my best bet would be to just by a phone and stick with my existing plan. With the S5 coming out shortly, there would soon be discounts on the S4, even if there weren't any at the time. I wasn't considering refurbished phones, because of the mechanical headaches I've had with mine. I'm all over secondhand clothes, but I don't want a secondhand phone.

So I googled (and amazoned and ebayed) to see if, perchance, there were any deals out there now. And, lo-and-behold, BestBuy, of all places was offering a (significantly) better deal on a new phone and plan with a Verizon contract than Verizon was offering directly, even with an employee discount. I was skeptical--and I remain confused about why on earth Verizon finds it advantageous to offer better terms through a third-party vendor--but it went through.

There was a scare half an hour after I placed the order that it hadn't go through: there was an "urgent" problem with my order. Was the deal a too-good-to-be-true mistake? Was there a red flag associated with my name because I'd tried to open an account earlier, only to cancel the order? Whatever it was, shout-out to the BestBuy customer service people, because they totally handled it (lest you suspect me of being a shill for BestBuy, you can search these pages, I think, for five years ago when I slammed their customer service over not being able to get a straight answer about delivering my microwave). Anyway, this time around, they really just dealt with whatever the deal was without transferring me a gazillion times or disconnecting me or otherwise leaving me hanging. They were just... helpful and efficient.

So I'll soon be on my second smartphone. It'll be the end of an era (especially since a very-shortly-thereafter-ex had helped me pick out the first one, and I've been with AT&T since I've had any cell phone, even when it was a different AT&T). More importantly, it's the dawn of a new, this-is-no-longer-new era. In two years, I've gone from barely able to operate a touch screen (I'd struggled to use my coworker's iPhone on a business trip in mid-March that year) to occasionally, absentmindedly swiping a laptop screen; I went from needing to be convinced to get a smartphone and not knowing or caring much about what phone it would be, to only considering an S4 or 4S, and from not knowing the difference between a smartphone and a tablet to having both. So this is a huge, first-world step: your blogger is all grown up!