More freaking geniuses.

Well, I’m almost buried in work again at Megacorp, but that happened late in the afternoon. That’s a good thing because my friend Megan launched me on a rather annoying adventure that took all morning, half of the afternoon, and my whole evening.

Megan sent me a picture of her friend Melissa’s new baby. The fact that I know that means that even though the geniuses I talked to today pretty much destroyed my day, my cell phone works. And I just fixed it just now, at 11:25PM.

So early this morning I tried downloading the picture from Megan, a multimedia text message on my cell phone, and had no luck. So I called Cingular, who hopped right to it after seeing “MEGACORP” in their caller ID. They tried several things but since the phone was purchased from Amazon and not a Cingular store, they couldn’t figure it out. They had me call Motorola and even gave me a number to call. The Motorola dude took my information and then told me, flat out, that a phone purchased from Amazon wouldn’t work and I was S.O.L. That didn’t make me very happy.

So then I called Amazon (google for the customer service number, it’s out there and not on their web site) to find out if they knew anything, and they said the phone should work with any network. They tried to get a replacement for me, but the phone was purchased too long ago (3 months!) and they couldn’t do anything for me but give me a different number for Motorola.

So I tried Motorola again and the woman was much more informative. I guess there’s special software downloaded into the phones (which can be edited by programs you find on the web, I now know) for each network. My phone is some weird international phone and didn’t have all the special Cingular bits. She didn’t know how to get me the bits and all the Motorola Service Centers are far, far, away from Portland, OR.

Next I tried to get Visa to help. This was a long shot, no dice since the phone didn’t get dropped into water within 90 days of purchase while being on fire. Don’t ask me, that’s just what I got from the Visa people, and I had to call two different Visa companies to get that odd explanation.

A co-worker told me to download the software for hacking the inner bits, so I knew I could give that a try. I worked late (after getting work to do, finally) and got home for several hours of trying to monkey with the inner bits. I’m sure I could get it to work after a lot of fiddling, but luckily I found another solution.

I found a weird site for migrating AT&T phones to Cingular, I think. The web site may not be up for long, but it had a link to set up my Multimedia mail by just sending me a text message. The website was https://secure.mouse2mobile.com/clients/newcingular/ota/mms/3phone.asp and it sent a text message to my phone that set up some weird stuff and I was able to download the picture from Megan and a test picture that the Cingular guys tried to send me earlier. Hooray!

And that was my day. Sheesh.