Minnemelvichportscow – BS!

So I assume most people have seen the ATT commercials with the people that travel a lot around the world and have ATT cell phones. I thought they were amusing because I feel like I don’t just live in one city either. One guy is an actor and you see a bunch of stages change behind him, another guy is a real-estate mogul who gets into a helicopter. I currently have an ATT smart phone so I thought I would try to come up with the city I live in like in the commercials: Minnemelvichportscow, for Minneapolis, Melville (NY), Munich (DE), Portsmouth (UK), and Moscow (RU). I’m not sure what my commercial would look like, either me sitting in meetings with different backdrops, or me typing on computers with different back drops. Probably not as interesting as a Real-estate Mogul or an actor though.

Now these commercials didn’t have any influence on me moving my phone from T-Mobile to ATT, I would have rather kept T-Mobile as their signal is the strongest of the providers in my house, but to get work e-mail on my phone I had to go with a provider supported by our IT guys. It works ok in the states and I do get signal in all of the countries I have traveled to so far. But that said it certainly isn’t as flexible and easy as they seem to point out. In fact a lot of the time my phone, though it technically works, is useless. The weirdest problem I only seem to have in the UK. When I leave the phone on it works great right away, if I leave it on for days however it starts to require different dialing criteria. For instance I when first turned on I can use my phone book just by selecting the name, a couple days later I have to modify the number to dial out of the UK, and even then this only works half the time. The solution is to reboot the phone. This is really annoying and at first kept me from using the phone abroad.

The next thing that is really crazy is that I have different rates where ever I go. So really my bill is normally a surprise for me. As it is expensed it doesn’t cost me, but it makes it hard to plan around when you do have a telecom budget. Also the dialing requirements change from country to county. So sometimes I can use the phone book and sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I can call local and sometimes I can only call back to the US. It is quite a lot of effort to figure out the rules for each country actually. So I find it amusing that the guys in the phone seem to use their phones seamlessly from place to place. I guess I am just traveling to the wrong assortment of countries.