Here’s why T-mobile are a bunch of assholes
So, going on one year I’ve had T-mobile as my cellphone provider. I am rather “meh” about them overall. Their voice quality is shitty, but I rarely talk on my phone, so that’s not such a big deal. I am thoroughly sick of my myTouch, and want to hurl it down the toilet, but there’s nothing in T-mobile’s lineup with which I want to replace it, and I do not know that I want to extend my contract with them anyway, so I am stuck with it for another year. Its stupid on-screen keypad and attendant typo-storms= bleh, its tendency to non-responsiveness in times of immediate need= double-bleh. Its stupid non-standard headphone jack that I have to carry an adapter for at all times (replaced on later models) and its dumbass super-old Android OS which T-mobile has made NO attempt to upgrade… its horrible useless camera… did I mention the totally out of date OS they refuse to fucking update, so I do not have access to all the cool Android apps developed in the last year? Well, lets just say I am fucking sick of it.
But that’s not even why they’re assholes. Here’s why they’re assholes. Their asshole website “MY TMOBILE HOLYSHIT OMFG ITS ALL ABOUT ME!” and online payment center. They are such fucking assholes that they refuse to store my payment method from month to month UNLESS I agree to auto-pay. Now, most of my bills are auto-pay and I prefer it that way. Electric, gas, water, sewer, they all just magically deduct from my account each month and I don’t have to think about it, and that’s nice. However some bills, mortgage and telephone bills especially, I want to pay myself. That’s because telecoms have a way of suddenly charging you some weird amount with no warning. My AT&T (home phone and internet) bill is NEVER the same month to month. And my T-Mobile bill has gone up by $.40 every few months since I’ve had the phone. (Bill amounts have been: $90.65, $91.05, $91.55, $91.78 and now $92.01) Why? Who fucking knows, it’s a fucking mystery. Is the extra $1.36 breaking my budget? No it’s not. But it does tell me that I should pay attention to my bills and what’s on them.
SO ANYWAY I pay my bills on time. Actually, another reason that I like to not have auto-pay is that I pay my T-mobile bill really far in advance, because that works out better for me in terms of budgeting. The week that it’s due is the week a lot of other bills are also due, so I tend to pay it two or three weeks in advance of when it’s due. You’d think they’d appreciate a nice, bill-paying customer like me, right? But no, they don’t. Because I will not submit to their auto-pay tyranny, they refuse to store my payment info. Not my bank account number, not my cc info, nothing. They do this to make it awkward for their non-auto-pay customers. Not only do I have to re-enter my info every month (using multiple screens, and typing in a whole bunch of data they could easily store. Like seriously, the system doesn’t even auto-propagate my NAME. Here on MY T-FUCKING-MOBILE they have trouble remembering who the fuck I am, apparently.) I also have to re-accept some kind of “one-time only payment terms and conditions” screen. Every fucking month.
This is a pain in the ass for me, as my credit card is usually in my purse (downstairs) when I am upstairs in my office at bill-paying time. Since I switched to Chrome and lost google toolbar, I can’t even store my CC info there, and something in me cringes at having it just saved as a text file, easy to access on my computer. I guess I could do that. But that’s not the POINT. The point is not that I should be able to come up with some workaround for their assholery. The point is that their practice is unfriendly to their customers, and they’re trying to hassle me enough and make my experience with their company’s website so shitty that I finally give up and give them at-will access to my bank account. Which I will not do. Hassling your customers into doing things only the way you want them to is NOT the way to engender brand loyalty, you stupid fucks. And every other website I deal with STORES MY PAYMENT INFO IF I WANT THEM TO.
I am sure some genius at T-Mobile is giggling in his coffee cup right now, thinking that he’s really come up with a brilliant plan to make customers sign up for auto-pay, and we’re too dumb to catch on to his clever scheming. But guess what, fucknuts? I am dropping you assholes next year for making my life more irritating than it needs to be.
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Did you ever notice that you can’t get to their regular site from My-T-Mobile Land? Like no matter what I click on there, I am still in My-T-Mobile Land. I have to manually edit the URL if I want to look over their not-related-to-prepaid plans and phones. The hell?
Last week, two days after seeing a missed call on my mobile (number witheld) I get a text message to tell me “Your parcel is due to be delivered tomorrow between 3pm and 4pm.”
Contacting the company I discover that apparently I am being charged £200 and an extra £5/month for my new iPhone 4. I hate iPhones, iPads and iMacs anyway – I wouldn’t have an iPhone4 for free let alone for that price.
Luckily, I finally got through to a guy who investigated and he assures me my account is now back as it was…I’ll find out next month.