Can You Hear Me Now? Umm, No.

And now a word on our new cell phone provider, Amp'd. As you may recall, we recently switched over to Amp'd because we had Cingular before, and they basically sucked (this is my personal opinion and not a "proven" fact). Amp'd has some good things going for it and some not so good things. The good thing is you pay only for the minutes you need. Not a bad deal at 10 cents a minute since before we switched I don't think we ever used more than 50 minutes in a month, and that was when we were out of town. The bad things about Amp'd are their customer service (you could literally be on hold for hours before getting in touch with a service representative) and on their pay as you go plan you apparently *have* to add money to the account every 60 days, and the minimum you can add is $20. Now if you add money, then it simply adds minutes to the existing credit you already have. In the grand scheme of things we were paying about $23 a month to Cingular for service before switching and were getting 20 free minutes (after the initial 20 free minutes on a month we would have to start paying some ridiculous rate for minutes). So now we're paying only $10 a month for service and minutes that we don't use up which then accumulate over time. I would prefer to be able to add less money every 60 days, but at the same time I realize they need to get an income revenue stream from me somehow. The other bad thing with Amp'd is they don't send you a reminder as to when you're about to hit your 60 day limit, and if you go past 60 days without adding any money, any minute credits you had on the account vanishes into the ether and your service is discontinued without any notice (a sweet deal for Amp'd I would guess since they simply gain that credit at that point). Take a wild guess how we found all this out? Yea, as we're driving to Richmond to start our vacation we noticed neither of our cell phones were working. So the Amp'd system requires much more diligence in maintaining it, but it is cheaper (for us since we don't make many calls) in the long run even if we put $20 on every month and never use all the minutes. We called up and reactivated once we got to Richmond, and pleaded ignorance on the 60 day thing and they recredited our accounts. I'll also add that they reactivated my account with the money I already had from before and didn't require me to add anymore more money this time (so basically I got the next two months service for free because of the inconvenience of not having cell phone access on the trip down.

So in the end, everything turned out okay I suppose, and Amp'd was still getting the tenuous thumbs up from us. Or were they? Once we arrived in Duck on Tuesday both our phones got a message stating that service may be discontinued on the 24th (this was on the 17th) and that we should call customer service for more info. WTF? I mean we just added time on Sunday, how could they have already screwed up our accounts? Here's where it gets good. When we finally called in on Sunday customer service was closed. So Ginger did some web queries and found out that Amp'd has filed for bankruptcy and is going out of business. That's why service "may" be interrupted on the 24th. Now we were a bit pissed. Because this is old news and they obviously knew this information when we called in on Sunday, but they neglected to tell us and accepted Ginger's $20 for 2 more months of service when they knew they only had another week or so of being in business (on the positive side at least I didn't put more money on my account also). This also explains why about a month ago they sent a text message to Ginger asking her if she would like to forgo the $100 rebate she was suppose to get for her phone in favor of credits on her account (we choose not to take the credit, but still haven't seen the rebate, and this point doubt we ever will since we'll need to file a claim at this point to even think about getting it). I might add that my phone also had a rebate which we've also not yet seen. At first glance it sounds like we're out a lot of money, but the funny thing is the amount of money we've invested into Amp'd since we started isn't that much more than we would have paid over the same time had we still been with Cingular. So I'm not overly upset about all of it, but it is disappointing since we had finally found a cell phone plan that we thought was reasonable given our limited usage. And luckily they pushed back the end of service time from the 24th to the 31st, so we didn't have to go out and get a new cell phone while on vacation (even though we actually did, but we returned it once we found out service was going to continue for another week). What's more annoying now is we have to go out and find a new plan. And the only plans we've found where we can use the phones we just bought are ridiculously expensive at like $35 a month per account. Which means any new plan we go to we'll probably have to buy phones, again.

UPDATE: Ginger wanted me to correct some misinformation. We called in and added time on Saturday before our vacation, not Sunday. And the first message about loss of service on the 24th came on the 21st, which was Saturday, not Tuesday (and their customer service was closed on Sunday).

Wow, that was a lot complaining about phones. As for around here, Catherine started ballet camp today, and Quinn drank a cherry smoothie (and to think you had to wad through all that phone crap for that little update). And I'll also add that going back to work after two weeks off really blows chunks.