I got into work today and got a "bing-bong" from my HTC Desire, took a look and I had a text message from the missus.. so I composed a reply and hit send, only to be be notified that sending had failed and it would retry.

Retry it did, and that too failed, again and again auto-retry sending failed.

So I tried the usual, disconnect network, reconnect, etc. turn phone off and on again, remove sim card, all the usual things that your average T-Mobile phone monkey (no offence to phone monkey's, I've done the job myself in the past) asks you to try. Still no joy.

So I called 150 and went onto their automatic "resend settings to my phone" and still no joy. Ahh well, I'll have to speak to someone then..

So I called them back up and went through a number of attempts of them sending and resending signals, checking stuff their end and power cycling the phone.

Now I have a handset which plays Angry Birds and Teeter, but will not connect to any network (TM or TM/Orange) as "Your SIM card does not allow connection to this network".

T-Mobile have kindly offered to send me a replacement SIM in the post, and waiver their usual £10 for this (well thanks, seeing as you caused the issue), or I could have driven to my nearest T-Mobile store, paid for parking, queued in-store, watched as some numpty attempted to sort the issue out, all in my own time (as I doubt my boss would be paying me to do this).

So the lesson I learnt today..

Attempt to fix the issue yourself, or just hope it goes away, as calling "technical support" leads to more issues.

Funnily enough I had similar VF experience last night with the same phone not being able to send a message and continually retrying. I thought it may have been down to my VF Sure Signal though.

Rebooting the phone, router and then the SS didn't seem to fix it but trying to make a call when there was apparently no signal kicked things back into life.

Well Orange have manage to send a Sim update to all Blackberry 8900 curves in the country (500 of them at our work) which inadvertently stops UMA from working - FAIL!!

Sadly SIM's can fail. Usually they get damaged having the phone bashed about. The pins that make contact help snap the chip.

SWMBO did this dropping her phone, but you could see the split.

Sadly SIM's can fail. Usually they get damaged having the phone bashed about. The pins that make contact help snap the chip.

SWMBO did this dropping her phone, but you could see the split.

It was fine, Data and voice were unaffected until TM tried sending commands to my phone then it didn't work at all.