I had a disturbing experience with my cell phone. As many people know, Qwest is dropping their wireless service Oct. 31st. Part of their current campaign to get people to switch to Verizon is to force a redirect of your phone over to their service center. In and of itself, this is annoying. I have already received the 50 million unsolicited text messages telling me the exact same thing. Not to mention the 100 million snail-mail notices. What is disturbing is “how” they redirected this call. First, they shut off all access incoming to the phone (was that really necessary?). So, for a few days, my wife wasn’t receiving a single call and we didn’t know why (until she tried to dial out). Given this, I’m not sure how many calls I may have missed. Second, when calling out, it forced the redirect and to stay on hold until you talked with someone. Hanging up and dialing again didn’t work. The hold time was over 10 minutes (apparently you don’t need to worry about quick customer service when you’re terminating service anyway). Once my wife finally talked with someone they “cleared” the phones. We were then told to turn the power off to our phones and turn them back on to reset. WHAT?!? Somehow, they were able to physically change some aspect on the phone itself to force this redirect (without the phone being powered off/on) as well as not being able to change it back without this power off. Now I’m wondering what other control do they have over my phone. Can they look at my pictures? See what values I’m typing in the calculator? What can they do? This is MY phone, not theirs. I use their service, but it isn’t their phone. I can, at any time, take that phone to a different compatible provider, so what right do they have to alter my phone directly? If this was an ISP in the computer world, I would have already contacted a lawyer/law enforcement for attempting to hack my computer.
I guess its a good thing Qwest is dropping their service, because after this I wouldn’t keep them anyway. Has anyone else seen this behavior? Do other providers hijack phones the same way? Add your comments, as I’m needing to choose a new provider.