Don’t you just love mobile phone carriers? I know I don’t. My family has three phones, my wife and I and my parents. We’re all on Sprint and we’ve had some issues with them in the past. I know my wife is harder on her phone than I am so when we signed up I got the extra $5 a month hardware protection for her. All three of us had the same model freebie Samsung flip phone and after a while her phone started having issues. We took it in and they fixed it.

I tell them I didn’t buy the phone from them and that I didn’t agree to any new contract.

I buy a Sprint Treo 650 off of a buddy of mine and call them up and tell them I want to use the Treo that I bought from my friend instead of my flip phone. So they say OK and now I’m using that phone. Well a month later I decide I want to try out the unlimited data plan. I call and ask if adding that to my phone will extend my contract, they tell me no so I add it. Months pass and I happen to be checking up on things and I see that my date of contract expiration is like a year later than I expected it to be.
Sprint tells me that when I upgraded my phone I signed up for a ‘new’ contract. I tell them I didn’t buy the phone from them and that I didn’t agree to any new contract. Several calls and much hold and ‘let me check’ and they agree to keep my original termination date. Fine.

More time passes and the wife’s ‘new’ phone just stops working. We take it in and they say it’s been submerged and so they won’t fix it. I’m like bullshit it’s been submerged. I know about the ‘red dot’ thing that changes color if the phone gets wet. I talk to the guy and ask if it has been really humid, and it was horribly humid at that time, could that dot change color just from the humidity in the air? Yes it’s possible he tells me. So I had been paying the extra $5 for hardware protection that they could choose not to honor if it got humid. They tell me there is nothing they can do.

So I had been paying the extra $5 for hardware protection that they could choose not to honor if it got humid.

We were fairly close to the end of our contract and I remember that we’re supposed to get some credit toward a new phone for being such loyal Sprint customers. Well come to find out that is misleading. You see you don’t get that much off the price of the phone that a new customer would pay… you get that off the ‘Retail’ price. So as a ‘valued Sprint customer’ my credit didn’t add up to what I would get if I was someone totally new to Sprint. Jackasses.

So we get a couple new phones and we’ve had them for quite a while and I call up to find out when my contract is due to expire. (Even if I’ll never get an iPhone I can at least go through the motions like I might actually get one.) I do the old 611 call and go through the automated system and it says, and I quote:

I see you have a one year contract that expires March ## 2008. Would you like to hear this information again?

That was about the date I expected… but that one year contract thing struck me as odd. So I called back and spoke to a person. They tell me that all of my lines are in a TWO YEAR contract that doesn’t expire until April of 2009!! After a little round and round I decide to see if I get a different answer if I roll the dice again. I hang up and call back. This next person tells me that two of my lines are on the two year contract that expires in 2009 and one of them is on month-to-month!?!?

After twenty minutes of going round and round about how does your automated customer service have the date I was expecting and how they are telling me different in two different calls I hang up. No yelling or anything… yet. Just repeating how I don’t understand why they are showing me in a longer contract than I expected and why the automated voice would be telling me something different from the live voice.

Round One: A Tie

Filed under: Reviews, Uncategorized, Cell Phone, Sprint