My Apparently Stolen Phone

OK, here's the phone story: Matt and I went to the grocery store the Saturday before last. That's relevant because that's the last time I had that cell phone. We called home to check on something, then called a bit later to say we were on our way home so we needed help getting stuff unloaded.

The next day, I was heading to Home Depot and went to grab my phone. It wasn't where I would normally leave it. I thought maybe it was in my car, but no. So, I just left and figured I'd find it later.

I didn't.

The next day I was out to lunch and I noticed that my phone charger was not in my car. Very unusual, since it would be in one of only two places -- either in the well of the console of the car or plugged in to the lighter socket. I have no reason to put it anywhere other than those spots.

That's when I decided that, maybe, someone had gotten into my car and stolen the phone and the charger. Maybe the car didn't get locked after we unloaded groceries. Odd, though, because there was also a bunch of change in my car that wasn't touched, at least as far as I could tell.

So, I called Cingular to see if anyone had used the phone in the past day. They couldn't tell. They can only see the minute summary from the previous billing cycle. But, I could get on the internet and check the minutes.

That led to about five calls back to their customer service trying to get my ID available on their web site, because it was probably activated before but I couldn't remember the password I used, and the "forgot my password" link wasn't helping a bit. Finally, I got a new user id activated ...

And I could only see the minute summary from the previous billing cycle.

So, a couple days later I went to the Cingular store. I told them what happened and could I get a new phone activated?

Well, no, not exactly. Ours was a former AT&T Wireless account, and they no longer had phones programmed for the AT&T service. I could get a new Cingular phone, and transition my account from AT&T Wireless to Cingular (you'd think that was dealt with as part of the merger).

AND, since I had family plan, I could either get one phone with an entirely different account, or get new Cingular phones for everyone on the account (Kathy, Ryan, and me).

Uggh, I wasn't prepared for that, and needed to go do some research on plans since there are fifty billion combinations of different plans and I don't expect/trust the Cingular retail flunkies to actually help me pick the right plan.

Finally, last night, I got the job done. Got three new phone pretty much exactly like the ones Kathy and Ryan had (Samsung). Nothing fancy. Got pretty much exactly the plan we had before - National Family Shared, 500 minutes. Didn't really get much in the way of help from the retail flunky, but I pretty much knew what I wanted so he was adequate.

Now I just have to re-acquire all the phone numbers that I had before.