My Mercury Retrograde Experience

We recently had the ultimate retrograde experience!

My husband and I really needed to upgrade my Galaxy S3 and his Iphone S4 phones which were three years old and giving us trouble. So when my husband stopped at the phone store to get help with his ailing phone and learned about the special promotion to upgrade cell phones until Christmas and pay just an additional $10 a month, he called me and was going to order one for himself . We would return in the morning to get mine! However when he went to sign paperwork, there was nothing in writing about the special pricing and he decided to go home and check with the carrier about that. I knew that Mercury was to go retrograde and we would be in the shadow (slowdown) period, but thought maybe it could work out, still being 3 days away. It does affect signing contracts as well as communication equipment. But, this deal would be over if we waited until after January 8th!

He called and they told him this was definitely the current promotion, so we went to the store the next morning but could not seem to get waited on. They were very busy and so we left after an hour. We went home and went on their website to order the phones, but the screen kept locking up or timing out. We got a salesperson through the website and she tried guiding us through the process unsuccessfully. She gave us a number to call to place our order. After being on hold over an hour we got a rep and placed our order for new phones.. We then had to go to our email to find a link to accept the contract. The contract was the standard one at full price and we questioned having to sign a contract not stating the price we were to be getting.. We could not complete the transaction because the screen again kept locking up or timing out. That person told us to close and try again, which we did, once again unsuccessfully. Next we were transferred to a Tech and at this point it was about 1:00 in the morning! If there had not been such a huge savings, we would have quit right there.

This guy was actually from Global Tech and assured us we would get this special price. He said he had just ordered 3 new phones for himself and his family and would check his personal email to see if his confirmation stated the sale price, and we went on hold. Naturally he could not access his emails. We were told they were doing maintenance on the website due to the heavy traffic. He said he did not see that our order had been placed, although we had been assured by the first Sales Rep that it was placed and just would not be shipped until we accepted the contract on line. He put the order in for us and promised it would not be duplicated. We accepted the terms on line and he said they would ship free by Fed Ex in 2 days. At 2:15 am we were finally off the phone! I must add that all the reps were more than helpful. The big sale coupled with all the retrograde issues made for a heavy load for them.

Our phones did arrive in 2 days and we set about to transfer the old phone information over to the new phones. Of course mine would not transfer. We called Customer Service and she asked for all the numbers on the box. The rep got the transfer process to start by giving the phone a bump from the office. She stayed on the phone with us for 30 minutes until she had to go home. It was still not finished. She promised to call us the next day to see if all was well, which she did! Even though I had charged the phone fully after opening it, the phone ran out of battery life. Sigh! I plugged it in and went to bed. In the morning when I unplugged, it appeared that everything had transferred over, except my pictures. But I found them later in the cloud. My husband also had some trouble getting his phone transferred and had to restart it several times before being successful. Note that in our email confirmation, we did get credit for the promotional savings!

Now after a week, things seem to be working and we are really enjoying our new phones. We did pay a price in time and frustration due to the timing with pesky Mercury. I thought the details were interesting enough to share with y’all!