Bitch therapy makes everything better.

[roadrunnertwice]

Let's play a game of "God, that sucks!"

I was on a Cingular GoPhone plan, which was this class of plans they acquired from AT&T. Those stop working this month; mine was going to stop working on Saturday. I eventually want to switch to a cooler service, but I don't have any time right now to do the actual shopping for it (sorry, onefiredancer). So, I migrated over to the newer GoPhone plan, which will tide me over until my life gets less stupid.

Here's what sucks. The new GoPhone plans are serving two purposes for Cingular: They're a way to give their customers less product for the same amount of money, and they're a way to stop paying upkeep on whatever AT&T registration numbers/tech/whatever it is they've been using (while hopefully holding on to the customers they shanghaied).

Fantastically enough, this hits me in the pants twice. The first one's obvious: I'd have had to pay ten dollars more a month to keep my current benefits; as it is, I lose a hundred minutes and have a limit slapped on my nights/weekends. The second one was actually a surprise, and I salute the triple or quadruple tag-team of corporate avarice and personal incompetence what did it to me.

Here's the deal: I bought an AT&T carrier-locked Nokia cellphone when I started my service. But not from the AT&T store! I actually bought it off eBay, for half the price the store would have charged me. Didn't worry about the lock, because it was going to work on my network anyway.

Except not anymore. The whole deal about standardizing and consolidating their plans that I mentioned? It means I need to switch from an AT&T legacy SIM card to a Cingular SIM card. Which my phone can't handle. Time to become the master of unlocking!

Which brings us to the point where some knowledge about cellphone carrier-locks is important. See, unlocking is easy. "Remote unlocking," they call it. You turn on the phone without a SIM card in, enter a special code (which is generated from the phone's serial number and model and the carrier you're using), and presto, you can use any SIM card in it. Nokias are especially easy, because there are websites that will generate the unlock numbers for you for free. Except there's this exception that kicks in. If you enter the wrong code five times, the phone will actually take its ball and permanently go home. The phone will still work fine, if you're using it on the service it's locked to, but it is no longer possible to "remote unlock" it, and it needs to be taken to a sketchy character with special hardware, who will charge you something like $40 for the service.

THAT was the kicker I ran into. The error message I was getting when I tried to unlock my phone in the library wasn't "You fucked up the code, three chances left;" it was "Your money's no good here, langer."

So what the fuck? There are two possibilities. The first is that the guy I bought it from on eBay probably tried to unlock it, didn't do his research properly, and accidentally engaged the lockdown. Once he knew he couldn't sell it as an unlocked handset for more money, he resigned himself to the pwnage and sold it to the first cheapskate who would take it (that's me! Hi!). The second possibility is that, after I'd bought the phone and before I'd bought the service, I distinctly remember taking it out and messing around with it for a while to see if it could do anything. I don't remember getting any error messages. But I don't really remember not getting any error messages, either. So it's entirely possible that I screwed myself over, two years in advance. (But naw, my money's on the eBay dude—back when the model was current, it would have been folly to sell it without at least trying to unlock it.)

So my nice little phone (which did pretty much everything I needed it to do, while being stylishly small and impressively rugged) is now indelibly locked to a service that no longer fucking exists, and the price to unlock it has probably surpassed what it's actually worth nowadays. (I'll look into it.) In the meantime, I went ahead and signed up for the new, spayed GoPhone service, and was given a free-with-rebate phone to use with it. And reader, it is the worst phone ever. Huge, bricklike body; tiny, stamplike screen; clunky, claustrophobic UI; and not capable of a fraction of what my cute little blue phone could do.

Long story short, I lose all around.

So when I bought the phone, the guy manning the counter at the Cingular store said, "I'm in a giving mood today," and went to the same site I'd been to half an hour earlier to unlock my new, shitty phone for me. And I appreciate that a lot, even though I could have done it in a minute and a half myself. But then he turns to me and says, "And if I find out you ditch this plan within six months, I'll track you down myself." Scold on, good sir. You do track me down, I'll buy you a beer for your trouble. In the meantime, I quote to Cingular the immortal and pissy words of Steve Jobs: I cannot wait 'til the day I don't need you anymore.

Anyway, maybe I can sell the shitty-yet-unlocked phone to finance the unlock operation on the one that isn't made of suck.