Dear Sprint,

I wanted to let you know that I received your little gift for my five year anniversary with what you like to refer to as service. You shouldn’t have. I mean it.You really outdid yourself this time, Sprint. A ringtone? For me? Wow. I’m underwhelmed. Five years at over $200 a month and I get a $.99 ringtone. That’s gross revenue of well over $12, 000. $12, 000! You should have sent me a moped or a cappuccino maker. Who is in charge of your customer loyalty program? Ebenezer Scrooge? Scrooge McDuck? A demented wombat named Carl? I mean, really, come ‘on, you don’t get why over a million customers fled screaming and crying like your service was a flesh eating pandemic last year?

This is a fitting crescendo to five years of terrible customer service, limited coverage, and some of the downright shittiest cell phone offerings on the planet. To whit:

I should have known this wasn’t going to work out. When I called your customer dis-service department I explained that I wanted to port my existing number from AT&T. I was first told that this was not possible. I patiently explained that not only was it possible for Sprint to do this, it was REQUIRED by FEDERAL law. I finally got through to your talking mongoose and she started to process my order. Then she told me “Ok, Sir. I’ve placed the order. Your new number will be..” I was, like, “Stop. No. No. No. No new number.” Then the inbred twit tried telling me it was a temporary number. What?!?! WHAT?!?!? NO! Don’t jack with me on telecommunications. It may be the one thing I know something about. Finally I said “You have no idea how to do this do you?”. Her reply, a very quiet “No.”

After talking to 15 more servile reps I finally gave up and went directly to one of your stores. It took over an hour and a half but the rocket surgeons finally managed to conquer the impossible and give me a new phone with my existing AT&T number. Oh… the phone.

I chose Sprint over five years ago because AT&T had no smartphone offering. So I bought the Hitachi G1000 which kinda looked like a brick. When I was talking on it with the leather case my co-workers would taunt me with “Hey, Schubert, you talk’in to your purse again?” The ever reliable Windows CE operating system would only reboot on every third call and I could never get it to synch with my laptop as promised.

So eventually I got a Palm Treo. The first one was OK. With a few exceptions. It was not tactile at all. Terrible. The touchscreen buttons were extremely small and required the use of the stylus (which constantly wore at it’s storage niche causing it to fall out in random airports/hotels) which was very frustrating when driving. Reaction to the touchscreen buttons was very slow. Sometimes 3 or 4 seconds. And the “hang up” button that appears after you place a call is in the same place as the “dial” button which, combined with the slow reaction time, caused me to constantly simultaneously place and disconnect calls. I mean, Palm, does anyone QA this shit? Ever heard of usability testing? And you’ve foisted this crap on hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting consumers. And Sprint, I would love to learn about the process by which you select your vendors. Is it a foot race? A typing test? Do you just sweep some technology ghetto and throw everything you find up on your website?

Once a year my phone would zero out causing me to get a replacement through your insurance program. It was usually an updowngrade. You sent me a “better” Palm model but it was always worse. Some of the highlights, no texting for 9 months, loss of ability to synch with my laptop, crappy signal, unexplained inability to synch wirelessly with my work e-mail, dropped calls like no tomorrow, no interoperability with Bluetooth headsets, and inexplicable crashes. The graphics look like something out of Windows for Workgroups and your browser can’t even handle java or reasonable page re-sizing. My favorite, and this highlights both your unbelievably horrendous customer service and the fact that the Treo is a steaming pile of phone dung, was last summer when the whatsit decided it wanted to alternate between two boot screens and go no further. I took it into the Sprint store in Hobart, Indiana (don’t ever try to do anything grown up or serious in NW Indiana BTW - but that’s another rant) and Einstein says “Yeah, that can’t be fixed. We can probably get you another phone by Friday.” It was Monday. This is my phone. This is my work. This is my LIFE you f*cking, f*cking moron. Why do I pay $10 a month for this insurance and replacement shite? So I ordered the new phone and went home. Twenty minutes of Googleing and I had my phone fixed. But I figured, I’ll take the new phone because maybe it will be better. It took THREE weeks to arrive. It’s not better. It’s worse.

Wanna hear about your wireless broadband card? You should, cause it’s mostly good. I get service most everywhere, very reliable, pretty fast etc. But I recently had to install your NEW connection software on a new laptop. I was excited because it looks wicked cool where the old software looked like something that might run on an Apple 2E. Then I had to use it today. 3 dropped connections in an hour. I’ll take the ugly sister who cooks and cleans and you can keep the pretty one with 67 pair of shoes and borderline personality disorder.

And let’s address two final issues. Why can you not provide service on the cell tower near my home? My AT&T and Verizon friend’s phones work at my house. My Nick’s Wireless and Gumbo friend’s phones work at my house. Why have I never been able to place a cellular phone call from my home you worthless, itinerate sacks of monkey leavings? Texting. Since it didn’t work in or out for the first nine months I had this metric a$$load of crap (another Google fix BTW) I didn’t do it. Now I do text and I find out unlimited texting is not included for my $200+ a month. Really? $.20 per message? Texting is that taxing on the cellular infrastructure? Two words for you. F*ck and You. I’m switching to AT&T and getting an iPhone.

Regards,

Patrick