I currently am using my Nexus One with a T-Mobile prepaid account. I couldn't figure out a way to get data without paying a (to me) exorbitant rate for voice time I will never use. So instead of T-Mobile making around $30 a month off of me for a limited data plan, I now pay them $1.50 on the rare days when I really need it, and then it's unlimited, so I just push as much data as I want.

So, as you may know, I'm out of town on a contract for a week or so. This is the time when having data on my phone is all but needed. So when I left the day before yesterday, I activated the "Day Pass" and my GPS worked the whole drive down, I was able to deal with email, etc., etc. Yesterday evening I went to activate it again. It was clear right as I did it that something weird happened, as it initially acted as if it didn't "take", but then it claimed it was active anyway, but all I got was redirections to their upsell site.

So I called technical support. After a good while of resetting defaults, power cycling, etc., I was told, "Oh, it looks like there's a known issue in your area, and it's been going on for a week." But it worked that morning. I kept trying to argue with him that there was some other problem, but all I got was a refund.

This morning, it still wasn't working. I tried to get the route to my contract into the phone over WiFi, but it didn't work, I got lost, and arrived half an hour late. After lunch, I called and spent an hour on the phone yelling at people. Just remove the data service from my account and let me try again. They can't do that. They claim that it's a widely-known outage, but it's been supposedly going on for a week, with no ETR, it worked fine for me mere hours before, and it takes every tech at least 15 minutes to notice this outage. I escalated the issue four times before I got "accidentally" hung up on during a transfer. I was told that it was a problem with the tower and there was nothing they could do. Of course, all the while, I was able to surf their upsell site and their "buy some ringtones" site. Of course, that, apparently, was all within the tower and didn't mean anything.

The service expired this evening. Shortly before it did, I confirmed that it still wasn't working. Directly after, I renewed my access. And, guess what? It started working immediately. I tried to tell them all along that my account was in some sort of limbo and could you please just try to reset it, or do something or anything to fix the problem. All I got was blown off.

I'm calling back tomorrow and escalating this issue again. These idiots need to know that they're idiots. Anyone have any good ideas about what I should do or say?