Tag Archive for 'augh'

I still hate T-Mobile.

Published
by
Michiko
on August 5, 2008
in Life
. 1 Comment

Continued from this crap.

It turned out that the reason why my phone wasn’t working all those months ago was because I had to get the sim card replaced… since apparently, by switching over my plan, it somehow died? I don’t know, I don’t get it either. So I had to pay $20 for a new card, thus losing most of the information I had on the old one. Great.

I haven’t really used my cell phone in the intervening period. Of that initial $50 I put on the phone, I still have like $48 left. The original plan was to have that money stretched out until I leave for Japan in November.

Then BAM, I get a text message from T-Mobile reminding me that my minutes are going to EXPIRE in a few weeks. lolwut? What is the point of prepaid minutes if they expire in a month anyway? I should have just stuck with my stupid fucking plan. At least then I wouldn’t have been hit with a $200 cancellation fee, and I’d have way more minutes to play around with. If anyone working at T-Mobile had told me that prepaid minutes expire, I wouldn’t have left my plan. ROAR. Thanks a lot T-Mobile support staff.

Fuck you, T-Mobile. Worst service of my entire life.

I fucking hate T-Mobile.

Published
by
Michiko
on June 26, 2008
in Life
. 5 Comments

My first cell phone was with Sprint, and I had it for a year and a half. It was expensive as hell, but the service was so beautiful and wonderful that I never really thought about how I was being gouged. Then my T-Mobile friends finally got to me. “Why are you paying $40 a month for 200 minutes?” they asked me. “For ten bucks less, you can get practically unlimited calling with T-Mobile!” So after a year and a half of them begging me to jump ship, I did. I cut my contract with Sprint, paying a hefty $200 early cancellation fee in the process. “Don’t worry about that,” my friends said. “You’ll practically earn that money back once you’ve made the switch to T-Mobile. That’s how much money you’ll save.”

Screw you, T-Mobile users.

I got suckered into signing a two-year contract that would charge me $45 a month for 300 minutes, as well as having that Top 5 crap. I didn’t get mobile-to-mobile because the monthly bill was getting to be ridiculous; whatever happened to T-Mobile plans with unlimited minutes being wayyyy cheaper than Sprint?

Then the dropped calls. OH MAN. There were so many dropped calls. I can’t even begin to tell you how many dropped calls I’ve had with T-Mobile. Sprint spoiled me by never dropping any calls whatsoever. Then there would just be weird bullshit stuff. At least a third of my calls through T-Mobile would have this weird echo effect, where I could hear what I was saying a split second after I said it. What the hell? I never had this problem with Sprint, or indeed ANY other phone service.

Whenever I e-mailed T-Mobile about these complaints, they’d send me a generic “Thanks for the feedback!” letter and not do anything about it. When I tried to actually call T-Mobile support to find out what the hell was going on, I’d get routed through several different recorded messages, none of them taking me to a flesh-and-blood human being. In the end, I never got the echo effect to ever go away, I just learned to deal with it the best I could.

Then yesterday at noon I decided to end my plan with T-Mobile and just switch to prepaid cards. Since I moved back in with my parents, I can just leech off of their land line and not have to really use my cell phone except for emergencies and whatever; why pay $45 a month when I can just pay as I go, like the commercials say? I called their support and somehow, against all odds, I managed to get in touch with a human being. This is the absolute first time that it worked, and it will probably be my last.

She told me that since my contract ends in April 2009, I’d have to pay an early cancellation fee. “What?” I asked. “Why should I pay a cancellation fee? It’s not like I’m ending my T-Mobile service.” Well, you’re ending your contract early, so you need to pay the fee. “But… I’m not really ending my contract, am I? I’m still with T-Mobile.” Ma’am, I don’t think you understand. You are ending your contract that includes your Top 5 and 300 minutes a month, so that means you’re ending your contract early, which means you need to pay a fine.

I have to pay a freaking cancellation fee even though I’m still going to be USING YOUR SERVICE? What the hell? Okay, well, whatever. I tell her I’ll pay the fine. She gives me the website to go to in order to put minutes on my phone, tells me I’ll be able to keep my phone number, says that I have 5 minutes of time on my phone so that I can set up my voicemail, and says that everything should be switched over within 24 hours. She recommended that I put some minutes on my phone so that I wouldn’t be left in the dark once the switch was made, so I went to the website and put down $50 for prepaid minutes.

Within an hour of that conversation, my phone’s signal completely died. I thought that was pretty weird since she said that I had five minutes or whatever to set up my voicemail, and I hadn’t used them yet. I figured that it was because they needed that 24 hours to get set up or whatever.

Fast forward to this evening. Right now it’s after 8pm, a full 32 hours after I had that conversation with the woman at T-Mobile. My cell phone still has no signal. I used the house phone to call T-Mobile’s customer service line. The automated message asks me to enter my cell number, which I do. It then routes me over to the T-Mobile prepaid hotline, where I am again asked to enter my cell number. This time, however, the system tells me that there is no record of my number in the database. WHAT. If there is no record of my number, how did you know to send me over to the prepaid department?! I ask to speak to an operator, except that for some genius reason I can’t speak to a representative unless I enter a legitimate T-Mobile number, and the automated system wasn’t accepting my number. ARGH!!

I call my cell phone from my house line and get a “The number you have dialed has been disconnected” message. WHAT THE FUCK. That woman from yesterday said I’d be able to keep my number, but all this bullshit does NOT look like I’ll be able to. Plus, where the hell did my $50 go?!

I call the T-Mobile number again from my house line and ask to speak to an operator. After being put on hold for twenty minutes, I get disconnected. This is actually the kind of thing that used to happen to me all the time back when I would first complain about the echo effect. I tried again, and after being put on hold for another fifteen minutes, I was disconnected again. ROAR.

So now tomorrow I have to catch the bus to the T-Mobile store and pray that someone there will be able to help me. I’m so pissed about this. I never had any problems like this whatsoever with Sprint. I wish I hadn’t switched over. If they tell me that my $50 is gone forever or that I can’t keep my phone number, I’m going to throw a fit, demand refunds for everything, and take my business back over to Sprint. I don’t care if Sprint’s plans are ridiculously expensive in comparison. I’d rather pay a little more for quality than skimp out and get bogus service with T-Mobile.

Fuck T-Mobile.

Rogue Galaxy, or Why RPGs Make Me Crazy

Published
by
Michiko
on May 26, 2008
in Video Games
. 0 Comments

I finally started playing Rogue Galaxy, which I bought over a year ago. I’m roughly six hours in and the story is already totally stupid. It starts off really cool, and the first hour was probably the greatest video game hour of all time… but as soon as the ship leaves Rosa, everything becomes retarded. The story reminds me of everything I hated about Golden Sun. Here’s a sample of the stupid plot:

The spaceship crash lands on a jungle planet, and the crew discovers that they’re out of a special kind of oil needed to fix the engine. But COINCIDENTALLY, the planet that they landed on is home to the Fire Fruit, which is where the oil comes from in the first place. So you venture off to find some fruit… except that you can’t find any. MYSTERIOUS. So you figure you’ll go to the (vaguely South American) tribal village to see if they know where the fruit went. Except that they hate all outsiders, so good luck trying to get them to talk. Also, there is a huge rock statue in the way, and for some reason you can’t just walk around or climb over it. So you go see a dude and maybe he’ll know how to move it (and he oh-so conveniently has the exact item you need to move the rock, a Zelda-ish power glove). Then you continue on except there’s another rock in the way, and I guess this rock is different from the other one because you can’t just move it with the gloves you got, you have to blow it up. AUGH. So you hunt down this OTHER dude who JUST SO HAPPENS to make bombs as a hobby, and he gives you a bomb. You know, for no reason at all. So you blow up the rock and go to the village, except that the guards won’t let you in. They tell you not to go to the springs, so OF COURSE that means you should go there. You get there and find two chicks, and you happen to save one of the chicks from a giant monster. The other chick says she’ll talk to the guards and let you into the village. You go to the village but OH NOES, nobody wants to talk about the Fire Fruit right now because there is a plague being spread by the Dark Fruit, and so to try and get rid of this Dark Fruit plague the villagers are going to sacrifice Chick #1 to the Star God and see if he’ll stop dicking around with the Dark Fruit. Except that you, as the hero of the story, can’t just sit back and let this happen even though you shouldn’t give a shit about these people anyway since they hate you and are constantly threatening to kill you. So you venture down the road to try and stop these idiot villagers from sacrificing the girl for GOD KNOWS WHY. Meanwhile everyone seems to have forgotten about the Fire Fruit or the fact that this story is supposed to be about being a motherfucking SPACE PIRATE, not a messenger boy for all these village idiots. AUGH. It just got so tedious and retarded that I saved and quit for the day. I can’t take much more of this “RPG Storytelling 101″ bullshit.

The first hour or so on Rosa (first planet in the game) was so awesome. SO FREAKING AWESOME. Then everything came to a grinding halt with the stupid planet Juraika, which is just a terribly uninteresting planet that doesn’t even fit into the whole “space opera” theme. I mean, the natives are literally jungle tribesmen who shun technology as a kind of evil heretic majick… so there is no technology at all. You’re walking around in a damn jungle. So much for the futuristic, ultra-cool sci-fi premise.

It doesn’t help matters that there is a cut scene like every fifteen seconds. Kill a couple monsters CUT SCENE. Walk forward a couple steps ANOTHER CUT SCENE. Stand in place CUT SCENE. Watch a cut scene CUT SCENE CUT SCENE CUT BLOODY SCENE. It’s even more ridiculous than Final Fantasy, but ten times worse because at least Final Fantasy cut scenes are interesting, add pressure on our heroes to save the world (or whatever epic climax is in store), and develop characters’ backgrounds and personalities. Rogue Galaxy cut scenes are gorgeous but totally stupid. It really is as though they took all of Golden Sun’s tedious dialogue scenes and turned them into beautiful-but-still-ridiculously-boring cut scenes. I’m watching the scene of Chick #2 (Lilika, if you must know, who is most likely going to join my party at some point because WHADDYA KNOW, I picked up some gear that only a Lilika can equip) talk about how Chick #1 is going to be sacrificed and how Boy doesn’t want Chick to be sacrificed because, um, well I guess because he just doesn’t. I’m watching this and going, who the hell cares? I don’t care. I want to be a fucking space pirate. I WANT TO BE A FUCKING SPACE PIRATE. I bought this game so I could live out my long-held fantasy of being the Pirate King Atomsk. LET ME LIVE MY DREAM!

I wanted to GO THROUGH SPACE and do PIRATE THINGS. Hanging out on a stupid jungle planet to keep these superstitious idiots from killing some chick that I neither know nor care about is not my idea of pirate behavior. AUGH. And the worst part is that it’s been going on for SO LONG. Those six hours have mostly been spent watching cut scenes of this retarded jungle drama. NOBODY GIVES A SHIT. I JUST WANT TO GET THESE FUCKING FIRE FRUITS SO WE CAN GET OFF THIS PIECE OF SHIT PLANET AND DO BADASS PIRATE THINGS!!!

Aside from the ridiculously stupid story, everything about this game is perfect. PERFECT. Which is why this game frustrates the hell out of me, because if only this game had a decent storyline, it would instantly become my number one favorite game of all time. Graphics are GORGEOUS. Character and monster designs are GORGEOUS. Battle mechanics are BEAUTIFUL. The save points, which also function as HP/MP restoration springs AND teleporters AND an item bank makes for very, very efficient gameplay. Battles actually require strategy, as opposed to button-mashing, so don’t go thinking that this game is super easy just because of these magical save points. The whole Star Wars theme is bloody awesome. The revelation system, the weapon fusion system, the bug raising system is all exceptionally awesome and are the kind of wonderful extra touches that Level-5 is known for putting in on their already great games. Just the fact that they crammed in tons of new content and features for the North American release, after the game was already a bestseller in Japan, shows how much time, money, and effort they’re willing to put into their products, and the quality really shows.

But that story… AUGH the story. It really is Golden Sun all over again. DAMMIT GUYS, I JUST WANT TO BE A MOTHERFUCKING SPACE PIRATE.

FUCK THIS JUNGLE. FUCK IT!!!!!

SPACE PIRATE, BITCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!