Monday, 21 March, 2005

Sprint PCS: Dumb and Dumber

If I was a screamer, the customer service representative at Sprint PCS would have received an ear full. I called today to check on the status of the trouble ticket that was filed last Monday, which was a follow-on to the trouble ticket that was filed the week before.

Once again, and as I had expected, Sprint's "engineering department" responsible for handling the trouble tickets failed to notify me that the ticket had been closed. The helpful customer service representative, referring to the engineering department's reply, began explaining to me the finer points of sending text messages from a 2g (second generation) phone. I quickly stopped him and explained that I don't want to send messages, but rather I want to receive them like I used to. I got another one of those blank looks over the phone.

According to my helpful CSR, the two previous trouble tickets did not clearly explain the problem. I find this somewhat mystifying, as the two previous CSRs I spoke with seemed intelligent enough to write a two-sentence explanation of the problem: "Customer cannot receive text messages, even though he was able to previously. Our system inexplicably blocks text messages sent to his phone."

In any case, after burning only 20 minutes of Sprint's toll-free technical support time, yet another trouble ticket has been created and the estimate is 36 hours for a response. I'll be on the phone to Sprint Wednesday morning. Any bets on the outcome?