Norwegian Empire strikes again

[jennyaxe]

On Sunday, my mobile phone made a strange noise, and when I looked at it, it said that the SIM card was inactive. Thinking that it was possible that I'd missed an invoice and forgotten that I'd missed it (or, indeed never received it, since the postal office routinely mixes up the mail delivery), I didn't argue. Then Calle spoke to the customer service and they said my account was in perfect order - and when I turned it back on, it worked.

Last night, around 1 am, it again claimed that the SIM card was inactive. I first tried to login on their web pages to check my account status, finding that they are unreadable in Firefox on Mac, so I called customer service.

According to the CS rep I spoke to, mobile phones occasionally need to update themselves and they then need to be rebooted. If they're not rebooted they may be unable to talk to the SIM card. She suggested that I reboot the phone at least once a week.

I've never heard about this before. I've never needed to do this on previous phones and I've never had this problem before Vodafone got borged by Telenor. Of course, this might be just a coincidence... But I half hope that the phone continues to do this every second day, because then I might have sufficient grounds to return it and break the one-year contract I made just before Vodafone got bought up. I'd really like to have nothing at all to do with Telenor, except laughing at them when they screw up.

Comments

[steverogerson.livejournal.com]

I had this problem with T-Mobile once, and they said it was because my SIM card was starting to deteriorate (it had outlasted a number of phones), so they sent me a new SIM and it worked fine.

[jennyaxe.livejournal.com]

That's entirely possible; I've had this SIM for more than a year. It's also something you'd expect a CS rep to know about...

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

A SIM shouldn't degrade in a mere year! Not unless it's being switched between phones, which might cause contact problems.

(One that has outlasted a number of phones is another matter, because it has been swapped.)

I can accept the SIM updates - those come out occasionally. But having to reboot a phone once a week is taking the yellow snow flavourant.

[jennyaxe.livejournal.com]

Mine's been used in one previous phone.

I'm not sure if the CS rep was just trying to get me off the line by using mumbo-jumbo and hoping I'd fall for it, or if she'd been told by someone else and fallen for it herself.

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

Ah, you should know that one... first rule of tech support: Baffle the calleer with bullshit and jargon in the hopes that they believe you and go away again, because when they call back, chances are it won't be you answering the phone.

Sunspots *nod* or maybe magnetic fluctuations owing to sunspots *nodnod*