T-Mobile, the trials of getting a Pac code

It's always been fun contacting T-Mobile if you have a Pay As You Go phone or as I call them a scum of the Earth phone.

They don't advertise any numbers and make it almost impossible to contact them but our Daughter was switching to a GiffGaff Sim as she uses a lot of texts and some Internet so at the moment it's costing us about £13 a month, on GiffGaff that would be £10 and she gets more benefits.

So we set the GG sim up nice and easy, made an account etc but she wants to keep her old number.

GG kindly publish a list of contact numbers so you can call vendors to arrange PAC codes.

My wife called from her T-Mobile contract phone to save money, she was then subjected to a 20 minute argument that they insisted on talking to our Daughter despite the fact she is a minor.
This is not the first time they have done this I told them previously they are in breach of law by insisting they talk to a 12 year old, as her parents they must deal with us but T-Mobile seem oblivious to this and kept insisting they talk to her.

My Wife explained she pays the bill and the phone account even has my Wife as owner and says our Daughter is not the owner of the account and phone, the stupid person at the other end said after 20 minutes they will put us through to a department to get a PAC code.

After 24 minutes on hold we then found they had put us through to totally the wrong department, come on T-Mobile, we can't be the only people ever to request a PAC code ?

Finally they put us through to another department, they seemed to be in the UK, understood what was going on, agreed quickly they didn't need to talk to our Daughter and even agreed the GG offer was better than they could possibly do.

So after a total of 54 minutes we got a PAC code.

In fairness T-Mobile that is an utter disgrace, you should hang your heads in shame.

A perfect example of out sourcing your company off shore to people who simply have no idea, no training or perhaps don't care less.

Anyone else going down this path needs to make sure they have a fully charged battery, some drinks and is sitting down as I'm sure this is by no means a record or a one off event.

Rocksmith and Ubuntu

Got nipper Rocksmith for Xbox 360 and it comes with a 1/4" jack to USB converter so being inquisitive I plugged it into my ubuntu 11.04 laptop.

No downloads, no Windoze installers or complaints about missing this and that, I literally plugged it in, went to the sound settings and there it was, it also shows in the hardware tab.

Open the sound recorder and it records fine !

Obviously if you install Audacity or similar then I'm sure it will give even more control and editing etc. It might even be worth checking it out on Ubuntu Studio which is geared for multimedia recording.

So for the money nippers not only got Rocksmith on the Xbox but a USB converter that works fine in Ubuntu - Totally amazing.

I love linux !