T-mobile rude awakening

Oh boy, you won't believe what t-mobile pulled on me last night... I'm using a t-mobile prepaid account, which is a fantastic option if you don't use your phone all that much. See my post from last year. You get 1000 minutes for $100, which are good for a whole year. Did you already guess where I am going with this? Yep - I received a message yesterday that my one year period is about to expire. No big deal, all you need to do to keep going is to buy additional minutes. So I did. Online. Right before going to bed.

After you go through the motions of entering all your information (they even ask for your SSN, even though it's not required), and submit and confirm the purchase, you receive a confirmation number and a friendly note saying that t-mobile might contact you within the next hour to verify your information.

Huh?!

Given that I did this right before midnight, I figured that no company with the slightest amount of common sense would call their customers at such a late hour and went to sleep. Fast forward 55 minutes.... and yes, you guessed it, I'm getting a personal wakeup-call from t-mobile at a quarter to 1:00am. What gives?!

I was so sleepy that I went right along with the protocol - name, social, date of birth,... it took me a few minutes to realize what was going on and when the guy said "I am now going to ask you a few randomly picked questions from our computer", I blew a gasket, asked him if he had any idea what time it was and told him to go to hell. Instead of offering to call back the next day, all I got was "I can cancel your order", to which I thought, "I could switch phone companies, dumbass!", and hung up on him, rolled around and tried to go back to sleep.

I didn't say it, because I've actually been quite happy with t-mobile so far, so I guess I'll let this one pass. I'll even offer some friendly advice to t-mobile as there must be a million better ways of doing this: You could offer the option to specify a convenient time for callback on the website. You definitely don't call people after midnight, or if you do, ask them if it is OK and offer to call back later. Or just don't wait 55 minutes - A call 5 minutes after placing the order would have been fine.

Oh - and yes, I could have switched my phone off before going to bed (and I usually would have), but I was on call the next morning with a chance of getting contacted by a colleague around 5:30am (bless his soul - he let me sleep in).