Month: May 2023

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My T-Mobile night mare

 

I’m 70 (almost).  Anytime I see a chance to save some money on monthly expenses I jump on it. Sometimes I jump too fast, and neglect to read the *fine print. This is just such a case.

Near the end of April I received  what I perceived to be a sweet heart deal.  AAA (which I have been a member of for about twenty years) sent out a flyer for people over the age of 55.  They have teamed up with T-Mobile, and if I switched from my current cell carrier to T-Mobile they would give me a load of perks:

  1. $27.50 / month (+ tax and fees) for each line, which is about what I was paying anyway.
  2. $100 in gift cards ($50 per line) just for doing the deed.
  3. They would pay my AAA membership every year (That’s worth $66 / year as it stands).
  4. (This was the straw that broke the camels back — that made me want to do this) They would pay off what I owed on our two phones, up to $800. This would reduce my cell phone bill by $56 / month.

Great! Let’s do this!  I drive down to the local T-Mobile store and talked to some really nice sales people.  Of course, the first one tried to upsell me. This was to be expected, that is what sales people are trained to do.  I left and came back a day or so later. I needed to procure the payoff from my current cell provider and needed that in writing. So I brought back this print out that had the cellular providers name and logo prominently displayed (This fact is important).  I also procured the port over pins for our two lines.

My sales guy, after I told him not to try to upsell me, attempted, and succeeded in getting me hooked up.  His manager came and helped him over some rough spots, all was well.  The manager was the one who clued my in as where on the web I could find the $50/line rebate and the pay-off the phones rebate.  My wife and I were assigned place holder numbers to use until our old numbers were ported over. A few days later I brought both phones in, and the porting process was started for both lines. All was well.

That evening, my wife’s number was ported successfully. But mine was not.  I waited a day or so, and then I noticed that on T-Mobiles website it showed that both numbers had been ported successfully, except this wasn’t true, I was still using the place holder number.

In the meantime, I went to the appropriate place on T-Mobile’s website to get the rebates.  The two $50 rebates were a snap and those will be sent to me in about two weeks.

The $800 phone payoff was another story.  It seems that my former provider was not on the special list of providers T-Mobile will pay off.  It happens that I just don’t have a spare $800 floating around.  I found this out at the website of course, but when I looked at the original flyer with the offer, the fine print mentioned which companies T-Mobile would pay. *I just hadn’t read that.  The question is:  why didn’t the T-Mobile manager at our local store know this? She saw my print out with the balance. She saw who it was from. Why didn’t she mention this? The other thing is that I probably could have made a big stink about the manager not informing me about the payout situation. Maybe I could have received it anyway. But I am also afraid someone would get fired. I don’t want that Karma.

So, at this point I will have to go back to the original provider, hat in hand, and beg them to let me come back; to reinstate me; to let me have my old payment plan back.  Well, lucky for me they were willing to take me back and all is forgiven.  So now I need new SIM cards for both phones, and I need port pins for both phone numbers (including the one which did not successfully port), so that my new/old provider can completely restore my service.

We tried three times to successfully port my old number into T-Mobile. I was thinking maybe that was why T-Mobile’s system wouldn’t generate a port pin for that number. Funny thing is T-Mobile’s web site still shows it as the active number for that account, even though it is not.

On Monday (tomorrow) I will go to the T-Mobile store to try and procure the port pins.  This is what customer service told me to do. I guess it’s because the new service is less than a month old. It’s some kind of security thing (isn’t it always?).  In the meantime, new SIMs are supposed to arrive by mail on Wednesday (Friday at the latest).  With those two provisions fulfilled, all should be well again.

Or not.

Waiting is.

 

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Why do I believe in Reincarnation?

 

First, there is Science.  The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – only converted from one form of energy to another. This means that a system always has the same amount of energy, unless it’s added from the outside.

Your Soul. the part of you that is you, also called the self (and which in fact is G-d)  is energy.  When we are not dwelling in a human body, we exist as energy, which is eternal.

That’s the first reason. The second:

Past life experiences.  Lots of them.  The three that stand out for me the most are:

  • When I was ten my grade school class took a field trip to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  We were vising the Egyptian room, and I was reading a plaque in front of a mummy.  The mummy was the preserved remains of a boy who had lived in Cairo.  A thought popped up in my head, “I knew this kid.”
  • I was a Realtor for a time when I was still living in Kankakee IL.  I was looking for a house for my own family, and this place popped up on the MLS.  The house is on S Chicago Ave.  It’s an Eastlake home. Eastlake was a contemporary of  Frank Lloyd Wright who took Victorian homes and gave them oriental lines, giving the homes some characteristics of pagodas.

I got the key and took a self-tour through the place.  That was easy, because somehow I knew the layout. It was like I had been there before.

I bought it. Moved my family in and that was that.  The house had six bedrooms, one of which had originally been a Maid’s room, and was at then end of the second story hallway, behind a door blocking the hallway.  Adjacent to the room was a back stairway to the kitchen.  Also on the 2nd floor, a full and a half-bath.  First floor had a small library (with a fireplace), a living room, a formal dining room and kitchen.  There was a lot of woodwork in the style of the time. The basement was finished and had an outside entrance.  The third floor was mostly used as an attic but at one time had been finished as a ball room.

In researching the house I learned that it was built by a Kankakee dry goods merchant. circa 1914.  Had I been him?  Why did I instinctively know the layout of this house?

  • In 1997 the movie Titanic premiered. My partner of the time and my step daughter went ot see it at 41st Avenue Theatre in Capitola.  It was a good movie. The writing was very good as were the performances by the actors.

But I didn’t stay through it.  When the ship’s stern turned straight up into the air, I left the theatre, returned to the car, and trembled for a good fifteen minutes.  I had a deja vu moment:  I saw myself as a young boy, maybe four or five. I was laying in bed. My mother sat in a chair beside me. Water was coming into our room from under the door. We were below decks. Trapped.

I have since tried to sit all the way through that movie. I have yet to succeed.

  • I used to have a recurring dream:  I am walking hand in hand hand with a woman beside a body of water.  It’s near sundown. I never saw her face.   I had this dream continuously, a minimum of three times a week, beginning when I was nine of ten.  In the beginning the woman was a young girl.  As I got older, she grew with me so she was always around my same age.  As I learned more about geography in school, the places the dream occurred in began to become recognizable.  Along the river Seine in Paris. By Lake Michigan.  On an island in the South Pacific. A few times, and this occurred before the debut of the first Star Wars movie, we were walking by some water, but their were two suns setting. That by the way is why Star Wars means a lot to me.

In May of 1999, I was living in Ashland OR.  Ceridwen came up from Santa Cruz to visit me and meet me for the first time.  We had had about a six month relationship by phone prior to this, but it was time to physically meet.  She was with me for a week, then she went back to Santa Cruz, got her ducks in a row, and moved it with me. We’ve been together ever since.

Now, here’s the thing. Remember I mentioned that the dream with the body of water and the woman and the sunset recurred for me at least three times a week since I was age nine?  During the week Ceridwen visited the dream did not occur. Not that I actually noticed, because I had a lot on my mind.  The dream did not recur. The dream never recurred, not ever, again.

So, from say, November of 1962 until April of 1999 I continuously  experienced this dream. That is almost thirty-seven years of my life.  The suddenly, a woman comes into my wife (the third of three wives) and the dream stops. Just like that. Cold turkey.

How do you explain that?