I changed jobs (at the same work place) recently and my new manager sees no reason for me to maintain a work cell phone. This has been my primary phone number for about 3 1/2 years now so everyone from my dentist to doctor to pharmacy and friends all have this number.
I rarely used it for outgoing personal calls, but certainly used it for BBM, text messages, and incoming calls.
For various financial reasons, due to divorce proceedings, I’d like to buy a phone and go on a prepaid plan. Do you think it’s possible for me to ask work to retire this number from their system and assign a new number to the work phone? And is it then possible for me to buy a phone and request the retired number for myself?
I did it when I left my last job. This was on AT&T, for what it’s worth.
You’ll need whoever is in charge of the cell phones at your company to authorize a release of financial responsibility for your particular number. You’ll then (likely) need to have the number ported from the company account to a personal account on the same carrier. I don’t know if AT&T has any pre-paid plans, but once it’s on your personal AT&T account, you should be able to port it to the carrier of your choosing.
The big challenge is going to be ensuring that the Keeper Of The Cell Phone Plan at your company is cooperative and helpful. In my case, I was the Keeper Of The Cell Phone Plan, so I was happy to help myself out.
Also, your company may be liable for an early termination fee if they release your line (many corporate plans are still term based) but they’re going to need to pay that if they shut off your line, anyway.
Speaking as an HR person, we are usually fairly reluctant to let phone numbers leave with employees. Similarly, we don’t allow employees to bring phone number in with them. There are too many opportunities for departing employees to misrepresent themselves as still being affiliated with the company after they’ve gone. Although it is by no means an epidemic, we’ve had a couple of instances where former employees have received information they were no longer entitled to have from clients who, after calling the same old number they had always called, still thought the ex-employee to be affiliated with the company. In our company at least, pricing information is very sensitive and if a former employee goes to work for another company, this can be problematic.
Depending on your situation, this might not apply at all to you and your company may well be amenable to porting the number. It certainly doesn’t hurt to ask.
With Rogers, you get someone with account authorization to call and authorize a Transfer of Responsibility. The rep will provide an interaction ID. You call into Rogers, provide the interaction I’D and your info and the account is now yours.
if the number is with Bell, Telus, or one of the smaller guys I expect it is similar. And second what Black Rabbit said about the ETF.
I’ll second what was said by black rabbit and stillownedbysetters. I just left a company after 20 years with them. Their company policy is to keep cell phone numbers with the company, mainly for what stillownedbysetters said, for Sales or Marketing / Product Management personnel. I was with Software Development so my former boss gave the okay - that was the first part in the transfer process described by black rabbit.
I completed this just last week. Be advised that AT&T had (still has?) a back-end system disconnect of some sort and it took them one week to complete the transfer. This was also experienced by another customer who was in the store the same day that I initiated the transfer, some system glitch on their end and not with my former employer. My transfer completed last week, one week after I initiated the process with AT&T.
It was a pain in the ass and it didn’t need to be, but eventually it got done. FWIW my # was originally with Sprint as a personal account, then a few years later transferred without problems to a Verizon personal account, then a few years later transferred into my former company’s AT&T business account, all without drama.
Good luck OP but the bottom line is that a company can choose to keep your number. As the old saying goes, “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
I had never thought of this aspect at all and now that I’m reading it I think you are correct. The security at my place of employment will certainly be against this, regardless of the technical feasibility of such an arrangement. Thanks for mentioning that.
I had a phone provided by my office, so that they could reach me in emergencies wherever I was. This was before cell phones became universal. Eventually it got to the point where it was more appropriate for me to own my own phone. I was allowed to transfer the phone account to my own name, and have been using it ever since.
There were a few business-plan-specific benefits that transferred over (now long superseded by the evolution of cell phone plans).
My personal cell phone number is the number I was given by a company back in 2002. I left that company in 2009, and they let me port my number out.
My next company had a strict rule that you couldn’t port a number in or out.
Both were cell phone manufacturers, so they certainly understood the technology involved.
On the positive side, actual phone numbers have become kind of superfluous these days. Because cellphones are the standard and all cellphones list their internal Contact List by name I think most people don’t really remember people in terms of what their phone numbers are anymore. I always had a knack for memorizing phone numbers but in the last ten years or so I find that I have no idea what a person’s cell number is because it just never comes up. I always just call from the Contacts list or the Recent Calls list.
IOW changing your phone number is nowhere near the hassle it once was in terms of letting all your friends & family know. Just call each of them once with your new phone and you (or just the Caller ID) will allow them to update your number instantly. Now its the opposite that’s the problem. If your cell’s contact list gets deleted and you don’t have a backup you lose their numbers, they don’t lose yours.
This exactly. Except for the dates, that is. A few years ago I ended up getting a new number anyway - I didn’t want the original number anymore for various reasons.
Not of immediate help to the OP, but more companies are abandoning the ‘company owned phone’ model and going to employee owned. My ‘work’ phone is actually mine, I own the contract and the phone. The company subsidizes my monthly bill (an reimburses me for a new phone every 2 years) and I install their work related app(s). Should I leave the company I have no interruption to my phone service and they simply delete my access to the work app(s).
As a benefit, the company saves money - no more keeping up with phone inventory and contracts. I like it.