Last weekend I spoke at Iowa Code Camp in Des Moines Iowa. It was a fantastic time, those guys put on a great event. After a quick dinner and iced tea (no post-event beer for those driving home!) at the after party, I headed out on my four hour drive back to the Twin Cities. The weather and road conditions were good. Until just south of Clear Lake. Suddenly the highway became one big ice sheet and cars were going into the ditch right and left. People were spinning out even when we were crawling along at 20 mph. Long story short - at one point I had to call 911 from my cell phone. (A Treo 800w from Sprint.) Many people, including myself, pulled off at the rest stop just south of Clear Lake to wait for the salt trucks. It was here that I started making calls to friends and family to let them know I was delayed. After I had make a few calls, my phone presented me with the following: "No more non-emergency calls while in emergency mode." Apparently my call to 911 had flipped something in my phone and I was now blocked from using it as a normal cell phone. I took a guess and dialed *2 - the number for Sprint customer service. As I suspected, I was able to complete this call. When I was finally in touch with a customer representative, I was told that she couldn't "access anybody's records" because they were "updating" their system." I explained that this was not an acceptable answer because I was driving alone in an ice storm at night in the middle of no where, and absolutely had to have a cell phone for safety reasons. Not to mention that my brother was driving south to escort me back because, well, I guess that's what brothers do, and if I didn't have a cell phone, we would drive right past each other - me going north and him going south. She continued to say that she couldn't help me and that I needed to "call back in the morning." Then we were suddenly cut off. When I redialed customer service, I was greeted with a "Please call back during business hours" message. (From a 24 hour service). By this time, the salt trucks had finally passed by and people were leaving the rest stop, so just staying put and waiting for my brother was not an option. (I had borrowed someone's cell phone to let him know that mine was out of service.)
I was left with two choices: stay at a rest stop in rural Minnesota at night, alone, or hit the road and drive in an ice storm with no cell phone. Then I happened to overhear that the rest stop had wifi. I flipped the switch on my phone and sure, enough, was able to connect to the internet. After that, it was merely a matter of googling to find the registry hack that would unlock my phone. After downloading a free WinMobile registry editor and deleting the specified entries from the phone registry, I was on my way again with a fully functional cell phone. (Although, ever since then I cannot synch to my computer - Active Sync doesn't even detect the device. Wireless Active Synch still works, though.)
There were so many FAILs in this scenario that I don't even know where to begin. The locking of a phone after a 911 call. (Don't you think that someone making a 911 call might have a pretty pressing need for communication capability?) The failure of Sprint to even explain, much less address the issue (The rep I was talking to had no idea what I was talking about when I was trying to explain the problem with my phone.) The Sprint system "update" that took out their entire support network including the customer service number.
All ended well - after reinstalling Active Synch on my laptop I was even able to sync my phone again. But this never should have turned into such a saga.