Brett Favre, Go Away; And Upon Further Review, Sprint Only Sorta Really Sucks
Quick-hitters:
- New episodes of The Office are coming back next week!
Yay!
- Argh! I have ~ $30 in CVS ECBs that expire on the 7th, and there’s nothing to buy!
What am I going to do???
- So I’m surprised it took only two months to hear that Brett Favre might already be regretting his decision to retire, according to an LA Times report. If the report is true…are you freaking kidding me? What happened to that teary-eyed press conference, when you insisted that you (paraphrasing) didn’t have it in you to play any more?
It took all of two months for you to recharge your batteries? Soccer players who clutch their knees as if they tore their ACLs, only to recover after drinking from a Gatorade bottle, are amazed by how quickly Favre did a double-take. Then again, who didn’t see this coming? Wasn’t it suspicious that Favre hadn’t yet filed his retirement papers (and no, I don’t buy the explanation that only players that need access to their pension money file the retirement papers; he could have given everyone around him—teammates, the Packers organization, his family, etc.—closure as to his playing status if he had filed those papers).
I wonder if it’s possible for a player to retire, wait five years, get inducted in to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and then un-retire. If it is, it wouldn’t surprise me to see a mid-40s Brett Favre returning to the Packers in the 2010s.
Oh yeah…Brett Favre, please go away.
- It is time for Part 2 of my Sprint Customer Service horror story. Grab a chair!
So on Wednesday, I tried to get in touch with my aunt to help her with the activation. It turns out that she was away from her phone :P. I decided to call Sprint anyway, and see how far I could get with them without her being there. I dialed Sprint’s activation hotline (1-866-450-1708), immediately yelled “ACTIVATION!” into the phone, and immediately heard an Indian-sounding woman. Fan-freaking-tastic, I thought to myself. I immediately told the woman that I needed to activate the phone on the line, pointing out that I didn’t actually have the phone on me. The woman immediately noted that there was a “hold” on the account, and after verifying some information, told me that she could go ahead with the activation once she gets the ESN. I reminded her that I didn’t have that on me, and she told me to go ahead and call Customer Service back to finish the activation. I asked about changing the phone number, asking specifically if doing so would not incur charges, a contract extension, etc., and she assured me that I could do this without charge.
Later on Wednesday, I got a call from my aunt, and I proceeded to make a three-way call with Sprint CS. I dialed *2, screamed “ACTIVATION” again, and was dismayed to hear a deep-voiced Indian male, who sounded a hell of a lot like the idiot I dealt with on Tuesday. I quickly determined that this guy was the same moron as soon as he “confirmed” that I wanted to activate a second line of service to my account.
-bang- -bang- -bang-
Eventually, I got him to realize that I was helping my aunt with a new line, but then I mentioned that I wanted to change the phone number first. I asked him if it was possible to change the number before activating the service, and he quickly responded “Of course.” I pointed out that I wanted to do this because, if it was not possible to change the number, I could still cancel the service without incurring any fees (due to Sprint’s money back guarantee).
A couple of minutes later, the rep notifies me that changing the area code could cause me to lose the current plan that we signed up for. Wait a freaking moment, I thought! I quickly let the rep know that if we were going to lose the plan, he might as well start processing our account cancellation. He responded by saying that he would not know if the account was going to change until he attempted to change the area code! I asked again, “Will I be able to cancel without paying any fees if this does not work?” His response was a hesitant “Yes, sir.”
Hesitation? WTF?
A few minutes later (consisting mostly of him saying a bunch of nothingness while I kept saying “huh?”), he said he was ready to make the switch, as long as we were willing to risk our plan. I gave him the OK, reminding him again that I was going to cancel the line if the plan was changed in any way. He then pointed out that, if the plan was indeed changed, he would “try [his] best” to give us a plan as close to the SERO plan as he could get. I immediately thought he was going to give us some junk plan, and point out that that was “as close” as he could get to our original plan.
(If a pilot were flying a plane extremely low on fuel, and he said he would try to get his passengers “as close” to the destination as possible, traveling a distance of the tarmac would constitute “close,” right?
About five minutes of silence later, he comes back on to the line, and announces that he was going to put through the request to change the number. Um…WTF was that five minutes of silence for? Were you twiddling your thumbs??? I blurted out “Go for it” and waited. I put the phone down on my desk and turned on the speakerphone, and went back to whatever I was doing before the call.
About ten minutes later, I caught a glimpse of my phone, and noticed that the LCD brightened up for a split second. Thinking nothing of it, I continued doing whatever I was doing. Five minutes later, my aunt says “Is [the rep] still there?” I picked up the phone, asked “Sir, are you there?” and heard absolutely nothing. My aunt told me that she was going to hang up the phone to verify that he was still on the line—if the call ended on my end, then I knew we got disconnected. Sure enough, we did!
(YOU #()**()#@*$(#@(*#@()$!*((!(!(!!!!!!!!! IDIOT. And no, I am 1000% sure that my phone did not drop the call; otherwise, why didn’t the call with my aunt also disconnect?
I also forgot to mention that he gave me more conflicting information, which I will now dub a “yes, but no” response.)
Noting on a piece of paper, “NEVER DEAL WITH MALE INDIAN GUYS WITH SPRINT” (I kid, BTW), I dialed *2 again, screamed “ACT-I-VA-TIONS”, and the IVR gave me the standard “Sorry…” message. I screamed “ACTIVATIONS!!!!” again, and got the same message. Totally irate, I screamed “OH MY [EXPLETIVE] G*D,” and the voice message told me that it was going to transfer me to a CSR.
(Cursing at the IVR seems to have a 90% success rate :P)
To my utter amazement, I got an English speaking rep named Whitney! I quickly told her that I wanted to change the phone number on the account, and after confirming all essential information, wanted me to confirm that I wanted a new 818 number. I pointed out that I wanted a 626 number, and then asked again if this was going to be completely free of charges or changes to the account. She said “absolutely,” kept me on the line for about a minute, and then broke the silence with “Do you have a pen on you?”
Stunned, I grabbed a pen, and she read the new phone number. I quickly logged into my aunt’s Sprint online account, and sure enough, the phone number was changed! I asked again—making absolute sure, and can you blame me?—that nothing adverse would happen to my aunt’s account, and she confirmed this. I asked her for her name, thanked her again, and called my aunt with the good news.
With my aunt on the line, I established another three-way call with Customer Service. This time, instead of screaming a swear—I knew my 11-year-old cousin was listening in to the conversation—I pounded 0 until the IVR transferred me to a live CSR. This time, I got a woman who had a thick non-Indian accent;I’m not quite sure what it was. Fortunately, she spoke deliberately, which made her quite easy to understand. The rep asked me if I had called in earlier about this account, and all I would say was a somewhat-witty “You betcha.”
I explained—very briefly, I swear!—that I’ve had to call several times, dealing with individuals of various intelligence, and all that was left to do, I hoped, was to activate the phone. The rep calmly explained that the phone was already active; now she had to explain how to program the phone so that it would work with the service. So apparently “activating” a phone wasn’t the same thing as “programming” a phone.
(Duly noted.)
The next part of the story gave me a headache, but for a different reason. The rep asked my aunt for the ESN number, but she kept blabbing random stuff as well; the only thing I could make out was the letters “DEC.” I interrupted the rep, got the attention of my aunt, and asked her to look for the letters “DEC” on the phone. After about five minutes, my aunt pointed out that she couldn’t even get the battery cover off the phone.
At this point, I may or may not have rammed my head into (through?) a wall.
Eventually my aunt gave way to my cousin, who started reading a whole string of characters off to the rep. I interjected, asking him “Are you reading this information off the battery?”
“Yes.”
I popped open the first of three Mexicokes I had that night.
After pointing out that he needed to read the numbers off the back of the phone itself, he read again in rapid succession everything on the back of the phone! I couldn’t take much more, so I screamed “LOOK FOR THE LETTERS D-E-C!!!”
I don’t quite remember what happened next—I might have passed out—but eventually the rep got the information she needed. Whew, I thought…we’re finally done, right?
Naturally, there was more to be done. The next step was to actually program the new phone number into the phone. The rep resumed her rapid-fire instructions, and I was having a hard time following along! You could imagine how much trouble my cousin had! I guess she didn’t realize that she was talking to an 11-year-old, but how many 11-year-olds would immediately understand what to do when a person tells you to “Push down on the four-way directional keypad, until you get down to the MSID (?), and then use the QWERTY keypad to enter the following string of numbers: xxxxxxxxxxx”? The operative word here is “immediately.”
I asked the rep to slow down a bit, and she was very nice about it, apologizing for going too fast. Once the task was complete, the rep resumed her super-fast speaking, and the only things I could clearly make out were “setting up voicemail” and “setting up the phone book.”
Again, I had to ask the rep to verify that no adverse changes were made to the account, and she verified this. Then I asked her to verify that the plan came with 500 minutes, 7pm nights, and unlimited Vision. She said “no” to the Vision, but I knew that this was not true.
(Background: My sister signed up for SERO two months ago, and under “Plan Details” on her online account, there is no mention of the unlimited Vision access. However, we verified it with two different CSRs, and with our own tests, that she was getting unlimited Web. I figured this was the case here as well.)
I pointed the rep to sprint.com/sero, and after about five minutes of researching, she verified that the plan did come with Vision access. I thanked the rep profusely, apologized to both the rep and my aunt for all the trouble, hung up the phone once and for all, and started on Mexicoke #2.
To my horror, I got a call earlier today (Thursday) from my aunt. Freaked out over the possibility that the phone still didn’t work, I reluctantly picked up. It turns out that she had just powered on the phone for the first time, and it was asking her to set up Vision access. I quickly yelled “I’ll set it up this weekend!” and asked if she had even made a call from the phone yet. She had not.
If you don’t hear from me after Sunday, assume the absolute worst :P. And in case you were wondering, yes, this was far worse than my Cingular story.
Oh by the way, did I mention that my aunt’s phone has a $50 rebate on it?
Will my aunt get her rebate?
Yes, after several Certified Mail-resubmissions -110
Yes, when Peter gets his XG/MGE Company scam-bate…er…rebate (that is to say, never) +110
Yes, after a bit of reasoning with the rebate company (explaining that I changed the number, e.g.) +150
Yes, and without difficulty +1000
Until next time!