Sprint Sucks (and other stuff you already knew)

I get my Sprint cell phone bill today, and it's WAY higher than usual. Further investigation reveals that I have been charged $36 for "upgrading" my phone. Apparently, if your phone is broken, you SHOULD NOT buy a new one to actually use the cell service you pay a monthly bill for. Just sit there twiddling your thumbs.

Naturally, I decided to call Sprint and complain. Usually when making complaints to big companies, I play it cool. Start with the call-center peon, and when they insist they cannot help you, pull the Can-I-Speak-To-A-Supervisor card. But Sprint so repeatedly tries to bend over myself and every other customer it has that I opted instead to launch right into a tirade.

Sprint: How can I help you today?

Me: Well, you charged me $36 for getting a new phone. I'm assuming I was supposed to keep using the broken phone I had so that you could continue robbing me by making me pay for a service I couldn't possibly use with a phone that didn't work. So you can go ahead and tell me how you can't do anything about it, and I'll continue to bend over and take one from Sprint.

Sprint: I can remove the charge from your bill.

Me [in complete shock]: Awesome.

Of course, then she tried to sell me phone internet, text messaging and anything else she could think of, so that it still took 10 minutes on the phone to execute a simple 30-second change.

But the lesson here is an important one: When it comes to corporate America, you can get whatever you want if you complain enough.

Case in point: The other day, in planning an overseas trip, I realized that my credit card limit was not high enough. But the company in question does "automatic" reviews of your limit, upping it whenever they feel like it. To solve this problem, I had to go the get-turned-down-by-the-first-person route, and then go to the supervisor.

The supervisor told me it was absolutely, positively impossible to get an increase in my credit limit outside of the periodic reviews. She urged me to check back in a few months to see if it went up. I explained how that would not help me book my travel plans and then dropped the bombshell: "This lack of customer service makes me wonder why I'm a [credit-card company] customer at all."

She put me on hold and voila! When she returned, she told me the limit increase that she deemed "impossible" a minute earlier was suddenly very doable. And I had double my previous limit.

Suck it, Corporate America!