One of the guys at work screwed his pin while trying to set it on his blackberry bold. I recieved the device locked in the state of prompting for a pin to unlock it, problem being we didnt know what the pin was. I was told that I needed to get the device unlocked so we could get it back to our man whom is entirely dependant on it. I dialed a Telecom 0800 number and selected option 4 for mobile technical support. The call went a little like this..........
Helpdesk Rep "Welcome to Telecom ........... speaking how can I help?"
Me "Hi have you got the 0800 number for blackberry support?"
Helpdesk Rep "I can help you with Blackberry Support"
(I call some department in Telecom at least once a day for various reasons and had been asking that exact same question at least 4 different times the month previous which no matter weather it was a Gen-I number or Corporate number I had called they all responded with that exact same answer)
anyway after explaining what was wrong with the phone i.e. "the device is locked" I asked simply how we could unlock the device. Helpdesk Rep replied "the only way to unlock the device was for me to go to a Telecom store hand over the device to them and they send to a 3rd party repair agent". I said " thats bullshit Im not doing that" Helpdesk slob replied "thats the only way to repair the device". Now this would take at least a week so we would have to supply our busy man with a loan phone or BB activate his email and then wait for the 3rd party repair agent to unlock, not good enough!!!! By this stage I was fed up with talking to this robot and I told him he was no help at all and I asked for the Blackberry Support 0800 number to which he finally gave me that was the end of that call.
So let me point out over the previous month I had asked for that number and on the 5th attempt of asking for it I was finally given it.
So what did I do next I called the Blackberry Support number and waited patiently on hold.
A lovely lady answered and said "welcome to Blackberry Support ............. speaking how can I help?" I said my name and where I was from and went straight to the point "I've got a Blackberry Bold thats locked how can I reset it?". She responded I think there is a way to reset it but she had to confirm and she asked if she could put me on hold I said Okay and when she returned she said yes this was possible but she had to wait to obtain documentation showing her how it could be done. I said great and asked for the documentation on how to do this to be emailed to me as it would be good for our our helpdesk documentation also(really its to give me another reason to not call Telecom), so I gave her my email address and hung up the phone waiting patientialy for the email to come through.
Ten minutes passed and no email when all of a sudden my phone buzzed someone calling from an unknown number, I answered and low and behold it was the lovely lady from Blackberry Support. Now I hadnt given her my Direct Dial or our helpdesk number either and she had called on an unknown number I was a little bit surprised. Any way she said she didnt have the documentation to email but all I had to do was enter the PIN incorrectly 8 times and the device would reset its self to factory settings. I said okay Ill try that and the call was ended.
Now I had observed when prompted for the PIN on the Blackberry the top of the window showed 4/10 and each time I did as I was told (enter the pin incorrectly) the first number would increase by one which logic concludes represents each time the PIN was not successful. So it got to 8/10 and logic defies thats 8 attempts but hey presto no reset hmnmmm was then I thought I have been known to gamble so I did it twice more and low and behold a warning popped to the nature of PIN incorrect resetting to factory default settings. It wiped its self and rebooted how it should have I tested it by making a phone call it worked. I buzzed out lotus man to reactivate email on the device followed his careful instructions and hey presto we were back in business.
The device remembered who the owner was and it was prompting for him to enter a new PIN number I took it upstairs dropped it on his desk he was a happy man.
So after a month of asking for the BB helpdesk number I finally had it, for your reference its 0800 BBSUPPORT and option 1 will get you past the script reading robots and to someone who knows a little about the subject.
