With all my ranting about public cell phone use, it might surprise you to find out that I just purchased a brand-new cell phone for myself. I never use the damned thing, but I always like to have the latest model. It's a tech geek gadget thing. But the guy at the Cingular store was a little thrown off by someone requesting the bare minimum service plan and the most expensive phone in the store. Ah, contradictions.
The new phone is a black Motorola Razr. It's really thin and tres hip, and does all the geeky stuff you'd want it to do. Not that I'll use it to do all that stuff -- no cockroach-sized Bluetooth headsets for me. I just use it to check my answering machine when I'm out. What a waste of technology. (But it is really cool!)
I switched service providers from Sprint to Cingular, because I hate fucking Sprint. My old phone, a Sanyo model, just plain sucked; I couldn't hear squat with it. (The Razr is noticeable improvement on the sound quality front.) But the back-breaking straw came about a year ago, when I got a promotional mailing from Sprint advertising a new, lower-rate service for infrequent callers like myself. Sprint thought I should switch, I agreed, and tried to do it. Then the fun began.
First, Sprint won't let you manage your service plans over the web. Annoying, yes, but not a deal breaker. So I called customer service, said I wanted to switch plans, and entered into thirty minutes of hell. The customer service rep led me down the long, convoluted path to changing plans (which should have been a simple checkbox on a web page), at the end of which was this interesting and unexpected revelation: To change plans, I had to sign up for another two-year contract. That's right, I couldn't just switch plans, I had to resubscribe to the new plan. This was unacceptable, to say the least; after all my hassles with Sprint, not to mention the sucky phone, I didn't want to extend anything -- especially when the suggestion to switch plans came from the company itself.
So I told the nice customer service lady to scrap the plan-switching paperwork, and to tell her supervisor that I would be switching companies instead, when my original two-year contract was up. Which it was this week, hence the new phone with a new company. Goodbye Sprint, hello Cingular.
But that's just my opinion; reasonable minds may disagree.
1 comment:
Hey, I am so glad to hear that I am not the only person that is fed up with "sprint tactics"(didn't cap the noun on purpose!)!!
After getting screwed with $200 phone bills I jumped on the new(at the time) "fair and flexible" plan, what a crock of crap! I was manipulated into a new 2 year plan and after about 3-4 months my "fair and flexible" turned into scam and double dipping and a complete refusal to acknowledge my plan was changed. I was so fede up, after almost a year of their crap that after recieving another $200+ phone bill I called and entered the HELL of Sprint hold time (it is parallel to the twilight zone), but to my surprise, after swearint that I was sooo freakin' fed up with sprint, it's tactics and also the piss poor customer service I'd received in the past, this customer service lady "actually looked at the plan I was enrolled in on her system, she also saw that it was "a plan" at all, in fact, some moron entered the wrong number(s) and it was clear the error was theirs. In the hour and a half that I spent on the phone with her, she corrected my "plan" and calculated how much I "overpaid" in the time that I had been in this "non-plan," I actually received a $300 credit to my account.l several months have passed and my wife just commented that the current bill contains mysterious and questionable charges.
"Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it!"
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