It was recently announced that Sprint would terminate the contracts of 1200 mobile customers because they were dubbed frequent complainers. According to Sprint, these selected few would often call Sprint's operators 40-50 times a month. This makes me very angry. If I was still with Sprint, I'd probably be one of those getting the boot. Sprint provides its customers with lousy customer service and they're the ones who pull the plug. Maybe if Sprint was able to fix their problems, people wouldn't call and complain so much.

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For those who haven't been following, my Sprint saga is a long, complicated tale. Let me take a few minutes to identify all the pages so you can follow the tale in chronological order.

First Phone
Unwilling to Help
Rude Operators
Proof of Stupidity
Final Solution?
Epilogue and Recap

I've written and complained about Sprint so much in my iRANTs it's starting to sound like a broken record. Now I didn't write everything that happened--it simply would have been too stressful to relive. Basically, I switched to Sprint because I got A Deal...and I love a really good deal. I thought Sprint's coverage was excellent and had no complaints about it at all. What did Sprint in was its lousy customer service. It started with getting the wrong phone and having to exchange it. When I got the phone I wanted, I had to suffer through terrible battery life (it didn't even last eight hours). I spent countless hours on the phone with Sprint trying to find a solution to this problem. Their employees proved to be incompetent and clueless (every time I spoke to a different person I got a different answer). Most companies keep logs and accounts of their customers. When someone calls to discuss an issue, the conversation is documented for future reference. Sprint's process was severely flawed because many conversations I had weren't documented and the ones that were often didn't accurately reflect what was previously discussed.

Then there was the waiting...always waiting. Every time I called Sprint there was always a 15-20 minute wait. And if I happened to be talking to the wrong department and they had to transfer me, it was another 15-20 minute wait. I'm a very impatient person. I hate Disneyland 'cause I don't like waiting in lines. I won't do it. My time means something to me...and I'm not gonna waste it on problems I didn't cause for myself.

But what really set me over the edge was when my plan changed. According to Sprint's computers my plan didn't include a feature that was very important to me. Two Sprint representatives told me that it simply wasn't part of the deal. They offered to add that feature for me at the "nominal" fee of $10 a month but insisted that it wasn't included...even though the contact I was mailed said otherwise. Sprint insisted that the document I held was either incorrect or not real. It took a lot of complaining on my part to get reinstated what was rightfully mine.

By then, I decided Sprint wasn't worth it. Even though I was getting a helluva deal (a phone bill cut in half), better coverage (my phone sometimes actually worked at work), and better hardware (that phone could do so much more than my T-Mobile phone could) it simply wasn't worth it. Even at minimum wage, the time spent waiting on hold ended up costing me more than what I was saving. It wasn't worth the stress I was getting because I felt so trapped and hopeless. In the end, Sprint did prove to be a great deal...of headaches. And that simply wasn't worth it.

Canceling proved to be incredibly difficult. Even though it took Sprint ten days to get me a phone and I didn't make a call or activate the account, Sprint insisted my contract started from the day I signed up online. That's ten days of airtime they charged me when I didn't even have a phone. It took a lot of yelling and coaxing to get someone to change my contract date. I made sure of it before I tried to cancel. I knew it would be a problem.

But when the day came I opted to cancel, Sprint had no recorded of that conversation. I flew off the handle--yelling at the poor girl on the other end. I felt bad because she proved to be a sweetie and helped me with all my problems. She looked at my account history and found numerous missteps by Sprint employees. She said my problem shouldn'tve been that difficult--that Sprint screwed up and made the process harder than it should be.

Even life without Sprint has been stressful. They have no record of me ever buying a phone there (yet somehow sent me three phones). They won't refund the money I paid when I bought the phone. They don't seem to have any sort of problem-solving plan at all. No one seems to know anything.

My hands are wiped clean of it. I want nothing to do with it anymore. I got my credit card bank involved and they're handling it. But I can honestly say switching to Sprint was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. It's not my fault and I couldn't have seen that ordeal coming. And it's not like it turned out to be a life-altering mistake--I'm back on T-Mobile now and everything is just peachy. But it was not a pleasant time or experience. I don't think I've ever been as frustrated and angry at Sprint as I was at anyone else.

Thank goodness it's over.

© 2007 siknerd.com