training training training

Saturday, December 11, 2004, at 09:26AM

By Eric Richardson

Don emailed me last night and accused me of having an attitude on the blog lately. Well, I'll try not to carry that over to this post, but...

I just absolutely confused some poor Cingular customer service rep. I knew so much more about how things work than she did that it wasn't funny. Here's the deal:

Kathy and I have a familytalk plan with Cingular. We've had a 1250 minute national plan to share between us, but over the last several months we've built up quite a stash of rollover minutes (1800 of them, to be precise). I figured we might as well use those instead of just letting them sit around, so I called up 611 to bump our plan down to 850 minutes (and save us $20/mon until we need to bump back). Here's where it gets complicated. I wanted to go ahead and make the change now, since why wait until our billing cycle flips on the 6th to start saving money? So I asked the CSR to check if the minutes on the pro-rated old plan would cover our usage already this cycle.

Right about there I lost her.

She said she would recommend waiting until the end of the cycle, to save some money. I asked her where that savings would come from. If I made the switch today the first 5 or 6 days of the month would be on the pro-rated 1250, basically giving us either 208 or 241 minutes (depending on if the change would pro-rate 5 days or 6) and costing either $12.90 or $15.48. The rest of the month would be on a pro-rated 850, giving us 712/685 minutes and costing $50.32/$48.39. So the effective plan for the month would be either $63.22 and have 920 minutes (pro-rate at 5 days), or be $63.91 and have 926 minutes (pro-rate at 6 days). Either way it's well under $80. So what I wanted to know was basically if right now would split at 5 days or 6, so I'd know if we'd be under the minutes for the first part of the month.

She asked if I would hold on a second while she went to check.

She came back and said they didn't do that.

"You don't do plan changes mid-month?"

"No, we do, we just don't do the pro rate and the minutes and that stuff."

At that point I cut my losses and had the change be effective 1/5/2005.