I had been all ready to post in a few days about how my Cingular woes had been resolved, but I’d been waiting for my October bill so as not to jinx it. But I seems to be jinxed anyway, so here goes:

Last time, I had been told that the paperwork for my credit had been filed, and I’d get a call back later that day. Of course, I didn’t, so two days later, I called back the customer service rep (who had given me her direct extension). Apparently her manager had gone on vacation, and no one had bothered to approve my request. She found another manager, though, and got the credit processed later that day, and I finally paid my corrected bill. I still haven’t seen a bill this month, so I don’t know if it will be for the correct amount, or if the paper bill will been sent to the correct address. I remain hopeful.

But just when I thought this had been sorted out… Last night, my phone stopped working. It was fine around seven, but by nine o’clock, my Treo was telling me to “check your SIM card to see if it is damaged or missing.” The SIM looked fine physically, but I assumed that somehow I damaged it somehow until this afternoon around two o’clock when Laura’s phone started displaying “SIM card rejected.” Both SIMs act exactly the same in both phones, and even my old AT&T Wireless phone can’t read them. It isn’t a network error; all three phones fail before searching for a network. The Treo and Sony-Ericsson act as if no SIM card is present; the Nokia is able to detect a card’s presence, but is unable to read it.

The odds that both our SIM cards would spontaneously fail within a day of each other seems incredibly unlikely. I called Cingular, of course, and they have no idea what’s going on, and claim everything looks fine from their end. My only guess is that they were reprogramming the phones over the air, and is sending something that fried the SIMs. I guess we’ll have go to the Cingular store and see if they have us new cards that solve the problem. Also to see if they sell Treo styli, since I seem to have lost mine today.

Cingular is starting to run out of ways to get me to annoyed at them. They’ve got almost twenty-one months left on my contract, though, so they’ll have to get creative.