The Changelog

Today, I placed an order with Cingular to switch our cell phone service from Sprint PCS to Cingular. Between Terah and I, one or the other of us has been a Sprint customer continuously since 1999, and since 2002, we have both been.

Cliff inspired me to write this.

I would now like to relate a few stories from my experiences with Sprint PCS. My overall experience with them is that if you have a signal, you get good performance, but their customer service and billing *sucks*. Yes, Googlers: Sprint PCS sucks.

Saga 1: We get married, and Terah needs to change the name on her account. Sprint phone people tell her she must go to a Sprint store. She went to one (which are always annoying, making you take a number and wait an hour with nowhere to sit). They told her that she must call customer service.

Saga 2: Sprint charges me twice for a two-week period of service. It takes about 10 e-mails to them to get them to finally understand the error and correct it.

Saga 3: Sprint continues to send me bills even after I canceled my phone with them (work got me a phone with a different carrier). It takes about 4 months for this to stop, even though every time I call, they insist "it's really fixed this time!"

Saga 4: I decide to get a cellphone with Sprint. They managed to botch this up so very many ways so very many times it's amazing. You can read the first half of it. After that message was written, they managed to over-charge me by $145 one month, fail to cancel services they said they would cancel (and thus charge me again). It was literally DECEMBER before the phone purchased in August worked correctly and my bill was correct.

Saga 5: Sprint claims our payment was received late, even though it was automatically electronically scheduled to arrive there early *AND* my bank confirms that it did. Several form letters later, I finally get a billing person with a pulse. They admit their was some glitch on their end, and they refund me the fee.

Saga 6: Back in March, I check the Sprint website. It says both our cellphones' contracts expired in October, 2004. Earlier this week, it says they expire in November, 2005. Yet I did nothing to the account (and certainly didn't agree to an extension) since March. Lots of confusion ensues on Sprint's end. I am given three different expiration dates from three different departments (including one of "the end of August", who knows where that came from).

So, it is time to move on.

Now, let's see if they really got that contract expiration date straightened out.