grr...stupid netscape lost my last entry. bleh.

(note: the following rant represents my opinions only, and not those of lasp, the university of colorado, or the state of colorado)

i'm quite fed up with dealing with sprint pcs's corporate office. we bought a bunch of these nifty
samsung sph-i300 palm-based pda/phones for the lab, and i got the first one to test out. unfortunately, we ordered it under my name, but the lab's credit card. for the past 6-8 months or however long we've had the damn thing, we've only been able to pay the bill a handful of times because -- get this -- sprint requires the billing address of your credit card to match the billing address of the phone. now, honestly, what kind of crack-headed accounting department would set up something like this that actually makes it harder for you to give them money? the bill for the phone gets sent to the lab's physical address, but the lab's credit card is billed to our campus box. just how hard is that to understand? so, to get around this problem, after we decided that the i300 phones are pretty damn nifty and ordered a whole batch of them, i called up our new sprint corporate representative, and asked him to transfer my original phone into the "pool" with the rest of the phones. a simple task, right? think before answering that. it wasn't until a month or two later that our sprint rep got around to sending me the transfer-of-ownership form, which i signed and faxed back to him. that was two months ago. our sprint rep has NEVER returned one of my voice mails. NEVER. and our accounting guy has been dogging him just as much as i have to get this done (since our accounting guy is the one who has to deal with the payment hassle in the end), and still sprint has done nothing.

now, don't get me wrong, sprint has a great reputation as far as i hear from my friends who just have standard service through them. of course, all of them have credit cards which have the same billing address as their sprint billing address. but sprint's corporate office? utter morons. if i'd have known about how they do business before we went into a contract with them, i would have put the technology upgrades on hold while we looked for a better service provider. of course, i hear that the other cell phone companies aren't much better. when will they learn that no matter how many nifty features they add, like being able to send someone a jpeg of a toilet to their phone in thailand, they still need good customer service. maybe doing away with the one-year contract would be a good start. the only times i've ever gotten a rapid response from a cell phone representative is when i've threatened to cancel my service. hm.