I'm THAT Jorge...

One of my best friends (Ryan H) once defined my personality so perfectly, even I felt like I knew myself better after I heard it. While trying to describe me to his girlfriend before we had met, he told her, “The thing about Jorge is: whenever he decides to care about something, he cares about it obsessively, regardless of how significant it actually is.”

After he told me what he had said, I shook my head in amazement. “Huh…..that IS true.”

It was sort of a compliment AND a criticism, packaged into one perfectly stated sentence. And he’s right.

I once got in a fight in 4th grade because I didn’t like the way one of my classmates was using the monkey bars. No joke.

So while this aspect of my personality comes in handy for…say, winning competitions, teaching things, and having a successful marriage, it also means that you can almost always get a rise out of me by telling me that Android OS sucks, or that Troy Aikman was overrated, or that good grammar doesn’t matter, or that Justin Bieber is the next Michael Jackson. It is why I struggle to write short blog entries (I have trouble running out of things to say) and why I am notoriously long-winded when given the opportunity to speak. It’s why people sometimes tell me that I have anger issues, and it is why I am good at motivating people toward things I care about.

But among all my passions, big and small, one of them has been more poignant than the rest lately. These days, there are few things that make me cringe more consistently than when I am reminded that T-Mobile has been sold to AT&T. The short answer for “why” is that I hate AT&T and I love T-mobile, but that isn’t entirely unique. There are a lot of people that hate AT&T. And most objective T-Mobile customers have been very fond of the company. But my feelings are unique because they are parallel to my personality.

I have publicly sworn never to be an AT&T customer again, as much as is reasonably possible. (If they became the only prominent national mobile phone service provider, I would have to conform.)

I also love T-Mobile…obsessively. Like they are a person. Like they are one of my closest friends.

So two of my most passionate insignificant causes are officially coming to a head. And yeah, when I heard the news of AT&T’s acquisition of my beloved Magenta, my eyes watered up a little. So shoot me. And this blog entry is kind of like my own personal obituary. The company I have sworn my eternal devotion to is on the brink of death, at least in my eyes. And it hurts my over-zealous, misappropriated heart.

Now I’m trying to figure out when and why I started to love T-mobile more than I love most people.

I was always late to the game when it came to technology. It wasn’t by choice, mind you. When my family lived in San Antonio (the first 11 years of my life), we didn’t even have a television until I was eight or nine years old. Before that, the technology in our home was limited to a record player/radio system. On Saturday mornings, while all of my peers would turn on the television to watch cartoons, I turned on the radio to listen to Mr. Rod and Flower, a christian children’s radio show about a man and his flower puppet. When we finally did get a television, it was an antiquated set, even for that time, when televisions were still offensively-heavy metal boxes. Cable was out of the question, so we had four channels to choose from when we watched TV, which was a rarity in itself. I don’t know if it was because we were poor, but I’m inclined to think that wasn’t the reason that we took so long to have any remotely-current technology in our home. I just think it didn’t matter to my parents, especially my dad. He didn’t like the influence of television in people’s lives, and I suppose that is a justifiable concern in this day and age. For many people, ‘family night’ was the time when the family would make some popcorn and sit in front of the TV together to watch a movie. That never happened in my home. Not once.

I don’t begrudge this of my parents. They had their ideals and, truth be told, I’m extremely grateful that I was raised the way I was. Every night was family night for us. Whether we were sitting in the living room to play a game together, or to have a devotional, or to play some music (we were band nerds), or to do some homework, we were always together in the evenings, and it’s the reason I never once doubted that my parents loved me deeply. Did I long for a television set of my own? Yes. I hated being at school and listening to my classmates talk about the most recent episode of X-Men and having no earthly idea what they were talking about. I even hated not knowing anything about the Muppets and Sesame Street. But I was content, and growing up without the ‘extras’ enabled me to grow up to be content even when I wasn’t able to have certain ‘things’.

Yes, this story is still about T-Mobile. Stay with me.

When my friends had a TV, I had a radio. When they had a cordless phone with digital voicemail recorders, I had a corded phone in the kitchen, attached to a tape-recording answering machine. When they used DSL, I used dial-up. When they used cell phones, I used……notes in class?

Considering the circumstances, I did a remarkable job obtaining an adequate amount of knowledge to carry my own in conversations with friends. I learned about the X-Men by checking out books from the library. I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music, so I smuggled a small radio into my bedroom and listened to the radio under my covers every night for 30-45 minutes. I purposed myself to read about computers whenever I had the chance. The knowledge I gained wasn’t enough to keep me on par with my peers who got hands-on experience with this stuff, but it was enough for me to stay “in the know” about what was current, hip and cool in technology.

My dad finally got me a cell phone when I went away to college in Houston, and it opened up my world. I was still more limited than my friends. They had newer, better quality phones, and they also had unlimited text messaging. My phone wasn’t even text-messaging capable and I was limited to 250 minutes per month, a total I was never once able to keep, much to my father’s chagrin. But I learned about that phone as well as was humanly possible. It was a simple phone, but it was pivotal in teaching me to be comfortable with technology. After ten months, my father took the phone back from me (like I said, I never once kept my 250 minute limit), and left me to get my own plan. And so I did.

I got the best phone available (at that time) from T-Mobile, the only company not requiring a deposit from me to open an account. I got the Sharp TM-150. It was a flip-phone with a color screen and 1+ megapixel camera with zoom functions and night mode options. Top of the line, guys. I loved that phone so much. It also had a dog-barking ringer, which annoyed everyone but me. Most importantly, it was nicer than just about anyone else’s phone. I was finally ahead of the game.

I’m on the verge of taking an unnecessary tangent. Already have, I suppose.

Bring it in, Jorge!

10 months into my time as a T-Mobile customer, my line was suspended because I hadn’t made a payment in two months. Several months later, I was able to make a payment, and this was my first notable experience with the customer service of T-Mobile. When I called in to make a payment and restore my account, the girl on the other end of the line was SO happy that I was getting service again. Of course, she didn’t really have a personal interest in whether or not Jorge Parrales could make and receive phone calls again, but that thought didn’t actually occur to me until after we had hung up. While we were speaking, I believed T-mobile had been counting down the days until I could be their customer again.

The truth is, there are an incredible number of personal stories that I could share about my experience with the customer service at T-mobile. They would bore you to death, and they would double the length of this blog, so I’ll spare you the details. But without exception, in the 7+ combined years that I have been a T-Mobile customer, every single time they had an opportunity to exceed my service expectations, they did. And every single one of those occurrences just continued to build on top of each other until the company itself became more than just an entity to me. The people representing the company began to feel like family to me. [I’m a little embarrassed to admit that] I started going into random T-mobile stores just to talk to the employees. They were that great.

Is this kind of loyalty a little overblown, no matter how good the service actually is? Probably. But that’s me. When I happen upon a good thing, I fiercely support and defend it. But let me just state this for the record. Maybe T-mobile didn’t deserve *quite* as much love as I have given them, but they came through for me when I put my own butt on the line to sing their praises.

A couple of years ago, I made an offer to Ryan H to get him to switch carriers. Because I had been so loyal to T-Mobile, I had accidentally become an equally avid Android fan. I always wanted an iPhone, but not at the cost of switching carriers. So when Android came to T-mobile, I gave it a shot and fell in love. Ryan had been using an iPhone with AT&T for a couple of years, but I was certain he belonged with T-Mobile and Android. So I told him to switch phone companies and get an Android phone. If, after 6 months, he thought the Android experience combined with the T-Mobile customer service was inferior to his experience with AT&T and the iPhone, I would pay either his Early Termination Fee or for a brand new iPhone, whichever one cost more. He took me up on the offer and never switched back.

Yet T-Mobile never saw fit to hire me. Boy, did they miss out on an employee of the year.

But now I’m looking at mere months (maybe a year) until T-mobile is absorbed into the identity and service and pricing standards of AT&T, and I’m dreading the day. Whenever that day does come, I will switch to Verizon and cross my fingers that they are half as amazing as the company I am losing.

*Sheds tear*