Mixed Signals

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

One does not start the day expecting to chat someone up at a call center. Well, I don’t. Friday was all about mixed connections, cross-country and across countries, courtesy of an issue T-Mobile is having with their text messaging.

It began this morning when I received a text message from a number in Jersey I didn’t recognize asking “who is this?” After some back and forth, this unknown Jersey guy accused me of sending pictures of his girlfriend to his phone, and I expected things to go south from there.

So, I called T-Mobile’s customer service number to have them check my text messaging log and ensure that my phone number did not send any message of the sort to this person, and block his number. Instead, I found that there was an issue that began around Christmas where T-Mobile G1 phones sending MMS messages over the 3G network were sporadically appearing as having been sent from the numbers of random other T-Mobile customers. Awkward.

I did something out of character, and instead of ignoring this Jersey guy or responding with a few expletives, I explained the issue and told him to Google it. A few minutes later, he responded saying that he read up on it, and we went on for a few messages about the issue, and that was that.

Through the Wires

Then, I called T-Mobile back to submit a support ticket for the issue, because the T-Mobile employees posting at the forum I had checked were advising people to do so in order to better trouble-shoot the issue. This is where I got way out of character and outside my normal boundaries.

After speaking to the support rep—Brittany—about the issue for a few minutes, I made some small talk because she had to look up something for a while, and awkward silences over the phone are annoying. Somehow, we got from talking about the obvious talking-to-customer-service small talk like “how’s the weather over there?” or “how’s so and so product?” to video games.

She started talking about playing Guitar Hero—on the Xbox 360—just before going to work, and before I knew it, we were talking for at least fifteen minutes about issues having nothing to do with T-Mobile, text messaging, or the G1. I found out she was Canadian, in art school studying photography, and a Sony buff (when it comes to cameras, not gaming, apparently). She found out I was in Florida, a web dev, and another photography enthusiast.

I finally said that the best thing I can do without maybe violating some workplace rule or doing something else awkward like that, is give her my Flickr address so that she could check out my photography, and encourage her to sign on and comment. And that was that.

Now, I’m kind of curious to see if she joins Flickr and keeps this story going.