Hmmm, this will not be an advertisement for my mobile phone carrier.

At times, I felt like a Verizon customer, saying into my phone, "Can you hear me now?"

The phone arrived as expected this afternoon.

I charged up the battery fully in a matter of hours and tried to place a call. The phone was in emergency use only mode.

And, no matter what toll-free customer support number I called, my ten-digit wireless number routed me to the same department, to people who couldn't help me, "Business services". Jeff encountered this same problem over the weekend when he tried to determine why the phone upgrade order was cancelled by the online ordering system. One cust. supp. agent became so frustrated by my seemingly unique situation that she hung up on me!

I guess what happened, among other things, is that Cingular did not begin migrating my account from AT&T Wireless until I called in this afternoon to activate my phone.

I called customer support around 4PM to say that I couldn't place outgoing calls. In an hour, they had the outgoing call problem resolved.

Then it was discovered that I could not receive incoming calls. That, as you might expect, took longer to resolve. The various errors were "all circuits busy" and "call cannot be completed as dialed" and "number is not a working number".

Jeff, on his Sprint mobile phone, was the first to contact me, around 6:40PM. Just over 90 minutes after my phone was activated.

At 9PM, some other carriers received the update for my number port and Cingular customer support was able to contact me.

I was able to contact me, too, from our home phone which is Verizon. Still, Jeff's desktop phone, which is an IP phone and the carrier may be Frontier based in Rochester, NY, cannot complete a call to me. Overnight, they ought to receive the update, too.

So, now I just need to keep an eye on the billing, make sure that they don't charge me twice or anything. And maybe I am all set.

The only thing that made any of this bearable was the new Panasonic phone with headset that I set up last week. In some cases, I was on the phone for an hour at a time, so the wall-mount kitchen phone would not have worked even with its extra-long cord as I was feeding the kids, helping with homework, getting this and that.

Maybe divestiture was a good thing, but, and I say this as someone who worked for post-divestiture Ma Bell, aren't there too many telephone carriers now? I mean, they don't integrate well at all. "Plays well with others?" U-uh.