T-Mobile, who last weekend had a major outage for all SideKick owners (yes, there are still some faithful who own Sidekicks, but not for much longer). However, when I contacted customer service, they continued to feed me company lies that our data was not lost and to stay tuned for further word on the restoration efforts of our data.
Having spent more than 15 years in public relations, working for more than one major mobile provider, I could read between the lines. When I first spoke to T-Mobile customer service on Mon., they reiterated the company mantra – that all things would be restored. It was repeated again on Tues., and for the remainder of the week.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when I received an SMS alert today, Sat. First, I didn’t even realize text messaging was returned to service, so any txt message was a surprise, let alone from the mouth of the best itself. However, the link included in the TXT message was not clickable, perhaps an omen for what was to come.
Excitedly, I was awaiting word on when my mobile phone book, one which took me better than three years to build, would be brought back to life, after a full week of being assured the data would not be lost. Following are the exact words that have put me in a bad mood on this Sat night, “Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.
Yet another example of the man sticking it to the customer. Where does the blame lie? Is it in T-Mobile. Or, perhaps Microsoft who recent acquired Danger, maker’s of the Sidekick and its Danger operating system. Well, I’m sure after all of the finger pointing one thing is for certain, the rich get richer, while Rich gets screwed again. T-Mobile, if you’re listening, a simple apology would be nice, but, why not go a step further, and do the right thing and bring back our data that we trusted you with.