Posts tagged “broken”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Repair or Replace a busted iPhone? [NYTimes.com] – “I reached for my phone. I dropped it and it smashed on the concrete floor.” Hoping to find an economical fix, he decided to try his hand at replacing the shattered screen. He purchased parts, first from eBay, then from a local repair shop, and got to work.After polishing his method on the phones of a few willing friends, it wasn’t long before he had improved enough to charge for his services. Mr. McElroy began offering to replace shattered screens, and eventually expanded his menu to include broken SIM card trays, cracked covers, water damage and more mysterious glitches, like unresponsive buttons. “There’s rarely a phone I can’t fix,” said Mr. McElroy, who estimates he’s worked on a thousand iPhones since June. “There was once a guy whose phone was thrown out of a 10-story window. The entire thing was split in half, but the motherboard was fine.” The worst phones aren’t the ones dropped from great heights, Mr. McElroy said. They’re the ones that are dropped in the toilet.

Very overdue, they said

Last week I got a call from AT&T, droning that my account was very overdue, and with that highly trained “When you will be able to make payment, Mr. Portigal?” – very confusing because of course I had been paying all my bills. Went and pulled the bill (yeah, I keep all that stuff) and it turns out I’m on automatic debit. So…I call them up and go through the usual voice mail hell and multiple people and eventually I am told “You were removed from automatic pay on /date/” – What?????????

I was a little uppity and demanded to know why they hadn’t let me know I was removed, so that I could make some other arrangement to pay my bill before it became overdue? They had no answer. They didn’t know why I had been removed, but they saw that it had not been paid for 2 months or more, despite being set to “automatic pay.” Did AT&T screw up? Or did Wells Fargo (imagine that?) cause the problem. I have no idea.

Now I’ve got to re-enroll (someday, when the damn form comes in the mail) in automatic pay.

After I hung up from the lousy support person, I went to the mailbox and there was yet another bill, telling me I was overdue, and had been removed from Automatic Pay. It then said “a letter explaining this will arrive shortly.”

No such letter has arrived.

What a broken system!

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