Dog Piss and Horse Shit

So the housewarming/seafood fest was a success. All our friends who didn't already have a written excuse from their parents were in attendence....there were large amounts of scrumptious food, we have cases upon cases of empty beer bottles and half the liquor we did when the evening began, the firepit didn't burn down the house.....oh yeah, and you people got my dogs so worked up that one of them decided to piss in the house that night. As it was a beautiful warm day we took 'em to the park the next day and we still had a repeat performance the next evening. Dumb animals.

With Noland down in Cali again this week, it was my turn to take up the baton fighting Cingular. We had everyone at the house Sat. check the status of their cellphones and determined that yes indeed, everyone with Cingular/AT&T has little to no coverage. Sprint was ok, Verizon was pretty good - but I think T-Mobile was the winner.

So the next day when Noland has to call his dad back 8 times - on fathers day - to finish a 30 minute phone call we decided it was definitely time to cancel the Cingular service and pick up with T-Mobile. Problem of course is that we're in a contract - we signed this new contract after Noland's phone got stolen at Ash Street one night the 'fats were playing (and I didn't keep a close enough eye on our coats.) This occured slightly before we moved into the new house. Working on the floors and painting and such before we moved in we realized we had an issue with coverage here, but waited till we actually moved in to call them.

Of course our 30-day grace period ended on the Sat after we moved in and we didn't call until Monday - having to wait to call from a location other then our house so that the call would go through and all - so when Noland called they basically told him to bad, they don't guarantee service everywhere. We tried other options that they gave us - spent a load of cash upgrading the phones, returning them and exchanging them - we gave it a fair shake. So I call this week and get a pretty firm 'No' from three levels of "can I talk to your supervisor then."

I am now waiting for a call from 'Herbert' an 'executive manager' who will retun my call within 72 hours. I went back and tracked all of the dropped calls. The past two months it's an average of 35 per month. If their no exceptions policy on getting out of the contract without paying the $300 is indeed no exceptions - they're going to give us free text messaging since that works more consistently and they going take 1% off my bill for every call that dropped the month prior. That should at least cover the cost of having to get a land line installed.

And that's my no exceptions policy.