The Pratical Joker

This weekend Mary and the kids and I went to Red Wing to celebrate a couple of birthdays: my mother's and my own. My parents and my sisters were all there. My father cooked some pork on the rotisserie of his new grill, Mary made a salad, my mother prepared vegetables in a crock pot, my Grandma Kraay who wasn't able to join us baked us a cake, and we all sat down to enjoy the meal around noon.

After lunch we opened gifts. Michelle brought out two gift bags that had been waiting on the kitchen counter, both brightly colored and filled with colorful tissue paper, one a with a card that read "Andy" and the other without a visible card, but assumed to be for my mother.

I was told I could go first, so I did, opening the card that my sister had picked out. The card actually held the gift, not the bag, which was a gift card toward an iPod I've been thinking of getting.

Next my mom opened her gift, with most everyone around the table interested to find out what it was. My mom discovers the card inside, in an envelope with her name on it, but oddly the envelope has already been ripped open, and her name is written in hand-writing not owned by anyone in the family. My mom starts to laugh. Inside is a note, but this one in a different hand-writing: Sofi's handwriting. And then my mom digs through the gift bag to find her "gift": one of Jake's chew toys!

Turns out the "gift" bag was fake! Sofi had concocted the ENTIRE thing, without telling anyone! Here the whole family was gathered around the dining room table, my Dad wondering what his kids had gotten his wife, my sister wondering what her brother and sister-in-law had gotten her mom, and Mary and I wondering what Michelle hadn't gotten for my mom. And the entire time it was a gift Sofi had thrown together from things she'd found around the house (old envelope included!), threw into a gift bag (also scavenged) and planted on the kitchen counter next to the other gift bag... without telling anyone! Sofi was one HUGE grin from ear to ear the entire time, and thought the whole thing INCREDIBLY funny. So did Grandma D!

The Lesser of Three Evils

Considering the season with such a title, one would think I am about to talk politics. You'd be wrong. Instead I want to talk about communication. Wireless communication actually, or to be more exact, the providers that provide it.

Due to some poor customer service back in September, I actually can claim to have experienced service from three of the "top" players: Sprint (my former provider), Alltell (my current) and Verizon (who was highly rated by Consumer Reports).

So that others can learn from my trials and tribulations and in turn make informed decisions I've decided to share my experience on this blog. Read on if you are in the market for wireless.

Don't let the fact about who is the current provider lead you to surmise that I would recommend them, because you would be mistaken.

Here is my experience with them in the order I signed up with each....

Verizon:
Out of all three, Verizon made the fewest mistakes and provided the best customer service. Every rep not only gave me their name, but an extension I could call to leave a voice mail for them. Unfortunately their one mistake was a big one: despite TWO online chats with two different reps, while they can provide SERVICE in La Crosse, they can't provide PHONE NUMBERS in La Crosse because the area currently isn't a primary market for them. In turn Verizon cannot port our old numbers to their new phones. The two reps I chatted with very clearly said that porting would not be an issue. They were both completely wrong. Supposedly Verizon will be buying Alltel within a year, and then Verizon will be a primary player in our market. I am looking forward to this.

Sprint:
Without going into details, let's just say that I've spent the last two years detesting Sprint for the worst customer service I've ever received when I originally signed onto my sister's family plan two years ago. I'd been waiting oh-so-eagerly to bolt as soon as I could. Which is why I tried Verizon above. When Verizon fell through I went back to researching and comparing prices, and sadly admitted that (at first glance) Sprint was about $20 less per month than Alltel (for a plan with three phones), and I couldn't justify paying $240 per year just to be rid of Sprint. So after two hours on the phone making sure Sprint could handle moving our numbers from my sister's account to our own, and picking out phones and a plan, I begrudgingly went back with Sprint. Until the next day, when my sister called telling me she'd gotten both a call and an email regarding the change in her plan. So when I called Sprint back to find out what was up, and they told me that I didn't have a plan of my own and that I would have to go through the entire sign-up process all over again... well, I "cancelled" that account (that never existed I guess) and took a closer look at Alltel.

Alltel:
So Alltel is who we ended up with. Like Verizon, they claimed to be able to port any number onto their phone, but when it came down to it, they were unable to port Ardelle's Arizona number... even though Alltel covers Arizona as a primary market, Alltel divides their markets up and can't work between them. Go figure. But this held up the delivery. When I called them to clear that up, they said it was now taken care of... but it wasn't, and the phones were STILL being held. But then they ported our numbers away from Sprint, without delivering the phones! So we had NO PHONE SERVICE for three days. After a long frustrated phone call the phones finally arrived, two weeks after they were ordered. But the numbers were on the wrong phones, and accessories that were suppose to be provided as consolation for the poor service have never arrived. And for some reason the phones seem to roam a lot more than the ones we had with Sprint, and the clarity in the calls seems worse than Sprint. Perhaps it is the phones we got, I don't know, but Alltel actually seems worse than Sprint when it comes to product quality, and only slightly better when it comes to customer service. Their website for managing the account even seems worse than Sprint's (and surprisingly parts of it only work on Internet Explorer... which means I can't use it on my mac!).

If I learned anything from all this, here it is:

• Keep notes. Even if you're purchasing and not complaining, note the reps name and what was agreed upon.
• Everybody has different offers. Not only should you shop around between different providers, but the same provider will offer different deals in different stores. Flagship stores have their own deals and warranties, satellite stores have other deals and warranties, and online shops have their own deals and warranties as well. The online stores have much better deals (no sign-up fees every so often, phone prices are lower, free shipping), but if something goes wrong as it did in my case, you end up paying for it by spending too much time trying to explain things to customer service.

Barack the Vote!

Mary and I went to the Obama rally in La Crosse this morning. We arrived around 8:15 (the gate opened at 8am), and discovered that the line to get into the event went was 4+ blocks long, winding it's way from Main and 2nd down to Riverside Park, where it then folded back in the opposite direction because Riverside Park wasn't long enough.

When we finally got to the security check point, we discovered that we couldn't bring in our thermal mugs (which lots of people brought because it was so cold so early in the morning---you should have seen the number of metal mugs thrown into the garbage can at the check point). Which meant Mary was about to go back to the car and chance missing the rally, something neither of us were too happy about. Thankfully a volunteer quietly suggested trying some check points further down... that oddly didn't have any thermal mugs in their garbage. That tip paid off, but due to all of this we went through different check points and got split up for the rest of the rally.

Neither of us got very close, and spent most of our time looking at the back of a heads. But we were both glad to be there, and we enjoyed talking with people we bumped into afterwards.

Mary and I both were moved by one particular statement: when Obama asked the young adults in the audience to serve in the armed forces, to serve in the Peace Corp, to serve in Americorp... in short to serve their country. And in turn he promised that the United States would make it possible for each them to afford a college education. For use that hit home two things we were glad to here Obama reinforce: that college tuition is getting out of hand for the average American, and that we could use some help with that, but at the same time we need to be thinking beyond just ourselves, that we need to be serving others.

How many people were there? The Democratic headquarters in La Crosse printed 14,000 tickets that they handed out to attendees as the waited in line, to be turned in at the security checkpoint. But they ran out. One volunteer after it was all done said she'd heard there was 16,000 in attendance. The La Crosse tribune is currently posting 15,000 in attendance on their website.

For La Crosse Tribune reports on the event, click here.