While the “Welcome to O2” screen is quite pretty, I actually expect a lot more from my mobile phone than being a glorified torch. The title of the post has already given the story away. That shiny new HTC Desire phone I was going on about endlessly a few days ago? As of about 6pm this evening it’s brain dead. An “over the air” update from Google destroyed it.
When it first happened, I thought “no problem - I’ll just reboot it”. Didn’t work.
After reading around on the internet - gleaning information from the super geeks (the foundation of my software development career, incidentally) - I tried a factory reset of the phone. That didn’t work either.
While perusing the O2 website support pages and considering a visit to an O2 store at the weekend, a popup window appeared, with an O2 support person on the other end of a chat window. It rapidly transpired that this chat window person only knew how to copy and paste scripted answers, so he gave me a phone number to ring.
Two minutes later - after navigating the robotic menus of the O2 phone system - I found myself being asked for a password I had no memory of ever volunteering. Thankfully the guy in the shop when I bought the phone also asked for a password hint, which somehow caused my brain to recall the entire conversation - funny how memory works like that. One trigger, and a dustbin full of information tumbled out.
Turns out the girl on the phone was no better than the guy in the chat window - although she did sound very nice, and was very apologetic. She forwarded me on to somebody who knew better. He sounded like James McAvoy.
For the first time in the history of me calling technical support for anything remotely complicated, I didn’t have to tell the support guy who I was, and he listened to the description of what had happened, and what I had done, and didn’t look at any scripts. He understood. I don’t recall everything he said in response, but I did hear the term “doorstep swap”. That sounded like a good thing.
Another two minutes later I had talked to yet another department - who also knew who I was with no prompting - and had arranged for a brand new handset to be delivered to my door on Friday.
While I’m annoyed the phone killed itself, and annoyed I will have no mobile phone tomorrow, a part of me is quietly happy about the service I received from O2. I want to be angry with them, but I can’t - they even said if I had called them earlier than 7pm, the replacement would have been here tomorrow morning.
While waiting for the order to be filled out, a thought occurred to me.
“Is the replacement going to be a new handset?”
“Yes”
So… I’ll be working from home on Friday, waiting for another HTC Desire to arrive. I wonder how long this one will last before I find some way to kill it ? So far the roll call reads as follows; two iPhones, one blackberry, and 1 HTC Desire.