I hate Sprint
I have just wasted over an hour of my life on the phone with Sprint, because they’re stupid…
See, in September of 2003, Mrs. Praxxus and I were getting ready to leave California for the new job in Indiana. I had a Sprint phone already, but it had . . . uh . . . succumbed to the lure of gravity a few times too many and was on its last leg. I was very much of the, “Eh, it works,” mindset, but Mrs. P. was worried about making a trans-continental caravan with only 1½ working cell phones. So the week we were leaving for Indiana she bought me a spiffy new Sprint phone, that was just like hers.
Yay! Twinkie phones!
We made the trip to Indiana okay, and with the whole new house/new job/new town thing kept our California phone numbers until January of 2004. That’s where the problem starts. The current cell phone has . . . uh . . . succumbed to the lure of gravity a few times too many and is on its last leg. I need a new phone sooner, rather than later.
“Luckily,” Sprint has a nice upgrade policy where you can get a $150 instant rebate on a new phone if you’ve had your current phone for two years and you re-up your service contract. Great! I go on-line, punch in my cell number and billing ZIP code, and see that I’m eligible for . . . the $75 rebate. I will be eligible for the $150 rebate in January. If this were just a matter of me wanting a new toy, that might work. Unfortunately the display is starting to go out on my phone, which makes it really hard to cycle through the phone book and find phone numbers.
So I call Sprint. They look things up. They tell me that I last changed phone numbers in January of 2004, so I am eligible for my $150 rebate in January of 2006. Then we went through no less than five iterations of:
“Yes sir, that is correct. Our records show that you first activated the phone in September of 2003, and changed your phone number in January of 2004. That is why you are only eligible for the $75 rebate at this time.”
“But you just said I’ve had the phone since September of 2003.”
“Yes sir, but you got the new phone number in January of 2004.”
Aaaagh! Keep in mind that these go-rounds were interspersed with long periods of time on hold, so that the customer “service” representative could look things up, talk to a manager, and no doubt badmouth me to her coworkers.
So after 35 minutes of this, they put a note in my account information, so that when I go into a SprintPCS store they can look it up and see that I am indeed eligible for the $150 rebate. However, it doesn’t show up in their on-line form.
I Hate Sprint 