Disaster Relief: 10 points for State Farm & Verizon and the Penalty Box for T-Mobile

[BarTopDancer]

My auto and renters insurance is through State Farm. Yesterday I received a call from my agent’s office to find out if I was affected by the fires and if I needed anything from them. Thankfully I wasn't and didn't. I found out that their office (and probably others) is proactively calling their customers in areas that are or may be affected, one by one to see if anyone needs assistance. Awesome.

Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile were doing disaster relief at one of the emergency shelters. I found out that Verizon had a few tables and a handful of employees to assist evacuees. They provided about 15 phones, several laptops and wireless cards. The laptops were available for people to check email, read the news or do whatever they wanted to do. The phones were just on the table for anyone to use, to take back to their area and make calls to whoever they needed to in relative privacy. The area was packed all day and all phones were accounted for.

T-Mobile on the other hand has me disgusted right now. T-Mobile sent 1 guy to set up a tethered phone bar (5 phones) and pricing plans! While the guy wasn’t actively selling service, the phones were all the newest phones and the pricing plans/promotions/phone prices were set up in the 8.5 x 11 acrylic displays. I actually feel bad for the guy. How embarrassing. There were only a handful of people who went by the table. It seems no one wanted to be stuck using tethered phones and looking at pricing plans while trying to find out if they had a house. Talk about poor publicity.