If you think that's bad, check this out. I convinced my Fiance to switch to tmo 2 weeks ago. She is from Hawaii, but lives in Los Angeles now, however, she wanted to keep her Hawaii number for all the usual reasons (work, vendors, friends, family, all have this number). When we got the TMobile phone, our friendly salesperson (who informed us that he was the 11th ranked salesperson in the state for customer service, and showed it to us on a corporate website) hooked her up with her phone, ported the number, and even gave us a free bluetooth headset.
A week later, we noticed that she wasn't getting phone calls from some people. Turns out, anytime a non-tMobile number called her, it was told "This subscriber is no longer in service". After two hours with customer service and technical support, they informed my fiance that 'we're sorry, but Hawaii uses different SIM cards than the rest of the US, so unless you can go to Hawaii and get a SIM card for 20 bucks, you're going to have to change your number to a Los Angeles one.
We called our 11th ranked salesperson, who wasn't in the store, and was told by one of the other associates that she didn't understand the problem and to call customer service.
I called customer service, again, and explained the situation to the technical support person, who had never heard of this problem. Her solution? After 45 minutes of waiting on the phone, she advised me to CALL STORES IN HAWAII AND BEG THEM TO SEND ME A SIM CARD, or go back to sprint and pay a cancellation fee of 200 bucks. Gee, thanks.
We then called a store in Hawaii, and I asked a rep there if it was possible to just buy a stupid card over the phone and mail it to me. He told me that that wasn't how their store did business and that he couldn't help me, unless I want to come in the store. I demanded to speak to his manager, because this guy clearly didn't feel like dealing with some Houle in LA (5 points if you know what a Houle is).
FINALLY, somebody got on the phone and represented T-Mobile the way they should have done in the first place. Angela, a manager (and part time angel) at one of the Honolulu stores told me that I had no idea what kind of pickle I was in for. She heard my story, laughed hard at the 11th ranked customer service sales rep who, perhaps whilst reveling in his personal glory, forgot to mention that our phone won't work without a HI sim card. She called that rep, busted his butt for not paying attention, and then found us a SIM card at a store in Marina Del Rey - the ONLY store in Los Angeles that carries Hawaii SIM cards.
The Marina Del Rey store told us that T-mobile has attempted to force them to stop carrying the Hawaii SIM cards, because some corporate beurocrat doesn't understand that Hawaiian's moving to LA might want to keep their number when they switch to T-Mobile.
Anyway, I still prefer TMO over all the other carriers, but in this situation they fumbled the ball, hard. Thank goodness for Angela in Honolulu who understood the problem, and knew the solution. Somebody give that lady a raise!
Feels nice to get that out. Whew.