Switching

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

January has been a month of switching.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I think I’ve switched pretty every a person can switch in the past few weeks.

I’ve switched my car insurance from Geico to Progressive. It ended up being cheaper to insure three cars and 4 times the insurance than the 2 cars I was insuring with Geico. Go figure?

I’ve switched my cell phone and wireless carrier from T-Mobile to Cingular. This process was actually interesting. For anyone who’s called me on my cell phone while I was at home, you spent most of your time saying, “I’m sorry, I missed that.” The reception was horrible and after 3 years, I’d had enough (you can tell for the most part I am a tolerant person).

Since I’m a person easily sucked in by clever advertisements, I was all about having more bars in more places (come to find out, that didn’t mean what I originally thought and Cingular really isn’t owned by Anheuser-Bush). However, I was really attracted to the idea of roll-over minutes as sometimes I do go over the 850 that I’m allotted. But just to make things REALLY interesting I decided to order my service and phones online via one of those cellular stores: http://www.cellularchoices.net.

To say the least it was an interesting experience.

Now in theory when all is said in done, I will have received my phones for free and made an additional $150 ($50 for 3 phones, Michelle, Kara and myself). The catch is you don’t get your rebates for 7 months, and you have to pay the cost up front. This turned out not to be a big deal because I paid the same price I would have if I had gone to the store to get them. To boot they included free car chargers which saved me some cash. So even if for some reason I don’t get the rebates, I’m still coming out ahead. I did call first to make sure the phones were new and not reconditioned and as far as I can tell, yes, they are new.

So far I’m happy with Cingular. There was a chance I wasn’t going to get my phones until Monday (which totally blew since my service switched on Friday), but the lady reset all the passwords on all the accounts and helped me setup voicemails and call forwarding. At first glance, customer service is looking good.

The fun part is that I got this snazzy Motorola V551 video/camera phone to play with. I had considered going for the V220 as I could find skins and face plates more readily, but I was able to find some online for the V551 that did the entire phone (without putting stickers on it), now all I have to do is figured out how to remove this rubber plugs so I can use me snazzy new T6 screwdriver to take this thing apart.

Moving from regular to decaf (though I don’t drink coffee), cola to diet

Switching, switching, switching.

Ah, but change is good. I didn’t say it was easy, but good in the long run.

Well, I’m off to go find some new churches to attend. You all have fun.