Right now I’m on hold with Sprint technical support. Again. As great as Tracy Chapman sounds on tinny on-hold music, I’ve got nothing better to do than blog about hating Sprint.<\/p>\n
Maybe a month ago I noticed that my beloved Treo 650 was sick. At random times it would simply reboot itself. This almost never happened when I was using it, but simply when it was lying around charging. It seemed harmless at first, but then got annoying when it occured more frequently and then when it wouldn’t turn on the phone automatically after it restarted. I would find that my phone had been off for half the day. Not cool.<\/p>\n
So I did a hard reset of the phone, suspecting it was something I installed. Nope, still did it. Took out the SD card. Same problem. I called Sprint. They said to go to a store. So I did. Got to the Sunnyvale Sprint Store at 6:30. They said the tech had gone home and I’d need to come back between 10 and 6. <\/p>\n
Wanting to get my phone fixed before I went out of town for a few days, I cut out of work during lunch on a busy day to go back to the store. When I described the problem, I told them I already did a hard reset. They took and said to come back in an hour. Well I couldn’t wait around an hour, so I went back to work, and came back around 7. <\/p>\n
They returned it and said they did a hard reset, even though it was written on the receipt I got when I dropped it off that I had already done that. I quickly reached the bottom of the inches-deep depth of knoweldge the Sprint drone had and she referred me to the manager.<\/p>\n
The manager tried to convince me that it was a problem with software I had loaded. Then I told him that there was no software on it, just what came from the factory. He scrambled around looking for a piece of paper that described how to fix this problem. He finally produced a printed powerpoint slide which simply had a Palm solution ID. He asked me if had done what it said there and tried to shoo me off by telling me to go home and try it. Oh yeah, sure, I memorized the entire Palm Knowledge Base and performed all the appropriate steps to fix my phone. I convinced him to look it up on the Palm site so we could see. <\/p>\n
It was then that I was truly convinced this guy had no idea what he was talking about it. Watching him trying to use a web browser was hilarious. He finally got to the support page after I pointed him to it and then he just tried searching for “solution ID” over and over again. Moron. Self-realizing he had no idea what was going on, he brought the phone back to his tech and said he was going to do something else to it. It was nearly 7:30 now and yesterday they told me their tech went home at 6. Riiiight.<\/p>\n
So I waited. They had “Alien v. Predator” playing on their plasma screen, which I assume was a ploy to soothe angry customers like myself. As I watched, I kept wishing that the manager was one of those hapless dumb humans in the movie that wander into where the aliens are hanging out and are instantly slashed to pieces. <\/p>\n
At 5 before 8 pm the manager comes out with my phone and says the tech downgraded the firmware on my phone. He said that the update made the phone “slow”. Sure. Yes, they uninstalled the update that I had installed months ago without any problems. It fixed a bunch of things and enabled bluetooth dial-up networking. Now I had none of that, but it was at least something I hadn’t tried yet. I went home. My phone rebooted itself a half-hour later. I gave it hard reset and declared it a problem for another day.<\/p>\n
I’m in New Hampshire now and I had some free-time on Friday, so I decided to bring my phone in again. I looked up the closest Sprint store and headed over after some other errands. The first store on my list was closed, though the hours clearly said it was supposed to be open. I headed to the next one and knew I wasn’t going to get my problem solved here; it was a mall kiosk, but at least it was open. They said I needed to bring it to a store with a tech. The closest one was 20 miles away and I was done running around for the day.<\/p>\n
Further annoyed, I called Sprint when I got back to my parents’ house. The first guy was nice enough, but didn’t know how to fix it. I told him that I had the extra warranty which he was unable to verify. I remember signing up for it, but apparently it never hit my account. Great! He said he couldn’t send me out another phone and said I should call the place where I bought my phone, Amazon. This seemed pretty strange, but it wasn’t like I had another idea.<\/p>\n
The first step was finding Amazon’s phone number. Didn’t I write a blog about that? Yeah, I did!<\/a> I navigated the phone maze through one guy and then another woman who told me I was smoking crack. They don’t take returns 11 months later. She did verify that there was a 1-year warranty. She told me to contact Palm, who will immediately tell you to talk to Sprint. Helpful, for sure. <\/p>\n I read some forums about similar problems<\/a> and they were able to request a replacement phone and have them send it with a return kit for the broken one. I made this my mission. Here’s the shortest route to that:<\/p>\n Call Sprint at 1-800-974-2211 The tech support guy verified that I had already brought it in and when I asked to do a return, he agreed. I guess you just have to ask for it. He transferred me over to some other department who could set up the replacement phone. I asked if it would be a new phone or a refurbished one. She thought it would probably be refurbished. I wasn’t pleased and asked for a new one. My worry was that the replacement phone would be older than my current one, and if it had problems, I’d lose the rest of my warranty. I couldn’t convince her to guarantee a new one, but I agreed to have them send me one. It should arrive sometime next week. I had been on the phone for 2 hours.<\/p>\n
\nHit 2
\nSay “Representative”
\nEnter your phone number
\nWhen you get off hold, immediately ask for technical support
\nFight through their gauntlet until they actually transfer you to tech support<\/p>\n