Cell Phone Woes

Heather and I are trying to save money by consolidating our phone usage. We currently have Qwest with unlimited long distance ($60 per month) and Verizon ($60 per month +$15 taxes, for 400 measly minutes shared across two phones). We want to switch to Cricket ($45 before taxes, probably would end up being $55 after taxes) for our primary phone with unlimited long distance (it would also be Heather's phone during the day). And I would get a prepaid wireless phone that I would only use sparingly (the only person I really talk to at all is Heather, and if I'm at work I could just talk to her on the work phone).

So we decided to try to save some money and buy a used phone that we thought would work with Cricket. Heather paid a lady $115 for a Motorola RAZR V3C phone , but also wasted a lot of time driving around because the lady lived far away. The next day (Saturday, two days ago), we took the phone to the Cricket office. The place was absolutely packed. I couldn't believe how many people were hanging out at Cricket. We took a number and after a 15-20 minute wait, we talked to a sales representative who told us that we needed to go to Customer Service if we wanted to use a used phone. So we had to wait another probably 30-45 minutes, and Jaiden was starting to get really squirmy. Finally, we got up to the counter and the lady told us that our phone wasn't getting any signal so it was probably damaged and it wouldn't work for us. During this time, Jaiden was slapping me in the face with his little hands which was making me rather frustrated.

We left Cricket and were both pretty angry and vowed to do all we could to recover our $115 from the lady and return the phone to her. Heather called her and "jousted" with her on the phone for probably 10 minutes before the lady agreed to at least look at the phone to make sure we hadn't damaged it further since we'd purchased it. We drove down to Pleasant Grove again and got lost due to Mapquest's directions being wrong; we finally located her place and she wasn't home. I was feeling pretty discouraged by this time. Heather called her and she came home. She looked at the phone and then gave us our money back. Once we got in the car (and inconspicuously counted the cash) we got the heck out of there. On the way home, we were feeling really relieved. We vowed that next time we weren't going to get ourselves into a situation where we'd buy something that didn't work.

So now we are still on the hunt for a used (or new) phone to use with Cricket. We're learning a lot about phones that we never knew before which is making the search take longer. Hopefully it will all be worth it in the end.