October 2023: the Screw Ryan Reynolds Edition
Welcome to my new newsletter home, Buttondown. I previously hosted this on Substack, but transitioned away because they’re horrible people.
What’s On My Mind
As many of you know, my father passed away in late July. My brother and I are working to resolve his estate, which includes paying his bills, cancelling his subscriptions & services, and returning rented equipment. This included returning his iPhone to Verizon, which was being financed thru installments.
So I could return his phone, I contacted my own wireless provider Mint Mobile to have dad’s phone number ported to my family account. This way, I could return his device but still receive the multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes needed to access his various accounts.
For the uninitiated, porting numbers is an everyday, routine activity, as is having multiple SIM cards on a single phone. Yet somehow, Mint Mobile fucked this up BAD.
Instead of adding my dad’s number as an additional line on my Mint Mobile account, they over-wrote my personal phone number with my dad’s! This caused me to lose a number I’ve had for 23+ years, which then prevented me from many everyday activities such as texting and MFA.
Fixing it was an equally-painful, multi-week saga, where Mint Mobile invariably made things worse by losing both numbers at once, switching the numbers between SIM cards (which made people I called think my dad was ringing them from the grave). You can read the account of my ordeal in this Reddit post.
Mint Mobile finally fixed the issue 21 days later — but not until I’d wasted countless hours down rabbit holes and filed a FTC complaint. They didn’t bother offering me financial compensation until asked, and I was offered a measly $15 credit for the 15+ hours I wasted with their support team.
Fed up, I asked for a full refund so I could take my business elsewhere. They initially agreed to, then denied, my request, until finally getting back to me today — 48 days into this mess! — that they’d processed a refund for my remaining balance of $51. By this point, the damage was done and I’d already switched providers.
The point I’m making = customer service can actually be easy, if you can show empathy and a desire to fix problems that are caused by your company. Instead, Mint Mobile strung me along for nine weeks and were OK with losing a very vocal customer for just fifty-one bucks. Sometimes it really does matter who you do business with!
Some Interesting Links
I’m always a nerd for cool typography, especially those with flair above-and-beyond all the look-alike modern sans-serif fonts. Airbus recently commissioned B612, an open-source font family for use within aircraft cockpit screens. Visit here to play around with it on the web. Also, brownie points to anyone who gets the font name’s reference!
The actor Danny Masterson was recently-convicted for multiple rapes, and his friends were unfortunate enough to have written witness statements to sway the judge to reduce his prison sentence. Rather than listening to them, you should take a moment to read the impact statements of the actual witnesses — each of Masterson’s victims!
At one point, Republicans threatened with the utopia that is a taco truck on every corner. Perhaps the next best thing are these baguette vending machines in France!
MMc…