Number Please....

I finally convinced my partner John that it was time for him to have a cell phone. 1. If he is out and about and has something bad happen - he can call for help.  2. If he is out and about he can call me and tell me where the heck he is (since I have been trying our home landline for the last 30 minutes and have no idea where he is.) 3. If he has a health issue he can call 911. 4. If he has something cool to tell me he can call me. 5. He can take a picture of the cool something he wants to tell me about.
6. He can play games on his cell phone. 7. I'm sure there's more, but the ideas escape me at the moment.

I am a customer of Sprint and I have had an account with them for at least ten years. I am happy with their service and right now they are offering a FREE account for a second line. They even allow you to BYOD (bring your own device). Currently we are paying over $90 for a Century Link land line and the idea was to port over the land line number (which we have had for over 20 years) to John's new cell phone. You would think that would be easy - right? Wrong!

We called Sprint to add the line. They gave us information of what they needed from Century Link. (I'm really compressing the 4+ day adventure into a few sentences here). We called Century Link and they were sorry to see me "go" but understood the economic reasons for my departure.

AND then, AND then, AND then, hours went by. Many phone calls ensued. Each time you call either Century Link or Sprint you have to go through the voice mail Hell and then go through having to describe the issue to each new representative. The representatives are nice enough (although you can't understand half of them) but it's annoying to have to start from the beginning each time.

We finally were able to determine what the actual problem of porting was. Apparently in 2005 a long distance aggregator (remember those) grabbed my line and added charges to my phone bill. The only way to stop them was to put a FREEZE on my phone. Which I did. That meant that no third party could do anything with my Century Link phone number. Which also meant  that Sprint couldn't port the number to John's new phone.

We released the freeze. This is now day six and the porting action has not taken place.

One nice thing was that Sprint finally recognized the frustration level and gave John a temporary phone number for him to enjoy. So, now we have my phone, the land line, and John's temporary phone number. They told us the way we could tell if the porting had taken place was that the landline would be dead. So far, it's alive and well.

You would have thought this would be easy - right!