More phone drama

I just can’t get enough of the phone drama, apparently.  Over the weekend, John did some googling and found that yes, our phones ARE unlocked, and yes, our phones CAN work with any carrier.  The solution (according to online sources) is to go to a Sprint store with a repair center, where they will have to add my phone to the network and possibly find me a new SIM card.  We tested that solution today.

At a different Sprint store, I handed my new phone over to a guy who disappeared into a back room with it.  Ten minutes later, he came out and said sorry, your phone isn’t compatible with the Sprint network.  I tried to get him to explain why.  He didn’t know.  I asked him who might know.  He didn’t know.  I asked him to point me in the direction of someone who might know.  He disappeared into the back again.  A techie (I assume) came out to talk to us.

He was much more personable, but the bottom line appears to be that because my phone isn’t ALREADY on Sprint’s list of approved phones, it cannot be added.  (This is the opposite of what two people told me before I made last week’s trip to the Sprint store, which is why I a) bought a phone from someone other than Sprint, and  b) went to the store in the first place.)  He went so far as to say there’s no reason he’s aware of why it COULDN’T be on the list, but he isn’t capable of adding it.  Who is?  Maybe someone in corporate, he says, but no one he or I could get in touch with.  Not one to give up, I pushed a bit more.

Eventually, he entered a ticket with I-don’t-know-who (hopefully not the same I-don’t-know-who from last week), and he says I should know within 72 hours if THEY approved adding my phone to the network.

Sprint may have lost us as customers (after 13 YEARS) either way*.  If they add my phone to the network, we can be lazier about finding another carrier (I’m considering the Project Fi thing with Google), but I think it’ll happen.  If they don’t add my phone, that’s getting done SOON.

*Yes, I started to play the lost customer card, but it only triggered  sales pitch for other phones.  Missing the point, dude.

One Comment

  1. momma betty

    I think the long-time customer only works in one direction–theirs to you. We’ve tried the “do you know how long we’ve been with Sprint? [21 years–really] Are you really willing to lose us over this?” The boys in the shops just shrug. They don’t care. Talking to them on the phone, they “seem” to care but just keep sending us to more and more people who all have conflicting stories about how it’s supposed to work. How do they stay in business? Why do we stay? Because they have the best data plan–not that we really need it. What a racket. We now have a need most of us lived our whole lives without–cell phones–but now we NEED them, and they can play with us like a cat with a mouse. And you can never get back to the person who originally gave you the wrong information in the first place. I guess you can tell you’re preachin’ to the choir here!

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