T-MOBILE IN AMERICAN CANYON DELETED IMPORTANT DATA FROM MY GOOGLE PHONE AND DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN!
I spent most of a week trying to restore the data, including a 6-hour round-trip drive to the Google HQ in Mountain View, CA for their help. But the data is gone forever.
IT STARTED ON A TUESDAY.
I went into the T-Mobile store and asked the employees to change the main email address in my phone's Gmail app and fix an issue with alerts. They managed to delete unrelated vital, irreplaceable data from my phone (as I discovered later).
ON WEDNESDAY,
I discovered the data loss and spent most of the morning on the phone with T Mobile's tech support agents in an unsuccessful attempt to restore the missing data. In the afternoon, I drove to Best Buy, where the Geek Squad also failed to restore the data.
ON THURSDAY,
I DROVE FOR 6 HOURS (ROUND-TRIP) TO GOOGLE'S HQ
...in Mountain View, CA, where the Google Store employees unsuccessfully tried to restore the missing data. [I had to go there because I couldn't find "real human" live Google tech support.]
ON SUNDAY,
to my surprise, I was able to live-chat with a real human at Google (because the Google Store had escalated my issue)! This took up a over two hours of my time, again without restoring my lost data. The Google tech agent informed me that the Mobile store employees had deleted not only my original files, but also the backup copies in the Google Cloud, because they had deleted the files manually.
I had to spend all this amount of MY time and energy (the 6 hours of driving to and from Google was an ordeal), spread over several days, in an unsuccessful attempt to reverse those T-Mobile employees' mess-up. And WHAT a mess-up it was:
WHY IT'S A DISASTER
The missing data was ALL the files in my phone's Google "Recorder" voice-recording app. I have a music band, and those files contain the melodies (vocals only) for new songs, many of which do not yet exist in other forms (we don't write music notation). Now they are gone forever. This is a DISASTER!
[By the way, they also deleted all the entries in my phone's calendar (details below).]
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE STORE:
As I stated above, I went into the store for help with my phone's Gmail app, as well as with issues with alerts. There were two employees there: one named Rick, and a another male employee with a fringe haircut, who I will refer to as "Employee 1" (since I don't know his name).
I was initially "helped" by Employee 1, who spent, I believe, 20-30 minutes fumbling around aimlessly. I could see that he wasn't sure what he was doing, so I suggested that he call over his colleague, Rick to help out - which he did. After a total of 45-60 minutes in the store, the two of them finally managed to accomplish the tasks I had requested.
MESS-UP'S AND DON'T GIVE A DAMN
Everything seemed fine when I left the sore, but, after I returned home, I noticed that the T-Mobile employees had deleted everything in my phone's calendar. So I called the store. I believe it was Employee 1 who answered the phone. I told him that he and his colleague had deleted all my calendar entries.
HE EXPRESSED NO CONCERN AND MADE NO APOLOGY. I then asked him if he could restore the contents of my calendar. HE NONCHALANTLY MUMBLED THAT HE COULDN'T RESTORE THEM, AGAIN EXPRESSING NO CONCERN AND OFFERING NO APOLOGY. HE JUST LEFT IT AT THAT. HE DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN.
So, that day, I had to devote MY valuable time to re-entering items in my calendar as best as I could remember them, and by researching them from other sources.
But the worst shock came the next day (Wednesday), when I opened my phone's Google Recorder app, to find that all the files had disappeared! I didn't call the T-Mobile store about this, because I knew that the employees would again express no concern, offer no apology, and would not give a damn. So I looked elsewhere for help.
FAILURE TO WARN
One of the T-Mobile tech agents support agents, with whom I talked on the phone, explained how my Recorder app's sound files and my calendar events became deleted: Apparently it happens on Google Pixel phones when you change the main email address. An ordinary consumer, owning a Google Pixel phone for the first time, wouldn't know that such seemingly disparate aspects of the phone would be interdependent. But T Mobile's "expert" sales staff in the American Canyon store, who have been selling Google phones for years, should have known this, and they should have warned me about it. But they DIDN'T!
Obviously, I will NEVER go into T-Mobile's American Canyon store again. This is the absolute pits! read more