I lost my phone today.
I’ve never done that before. I still have no idea how it got away from me.
The story has a strange but happy ending, which I won’t bore you with now. I’ll save all the boring stuff for when I fill in on KTLK AM 1150 this Sunday.
But I did want to relate part of the story now, because I have to believe if I just vent a little, the throbbing behind my left eye will stop, and I can get back to the serious business of playing Bejeweled on my laptop.
It started when I got home, and I realized my phone was gone. I realized I needed to suspend service on it right away, because I didn’t want to be paying for phone sex calls to Manilla. So I went to the Sprint website and logged on to my account.
Now, you would think that when Sprint was designing their web site, when they were holding JD Power & Asociates customer satisfaction workshops and asking focus groups to tell them how their logo made them feel, someone over there might have thought, “Hey, I bet people will need to use this site when they lose their phone! People will be nervous if their phone is missing, and they’ll want to suspend the service immediately.”
You would think.
Well, here’s the problem with that.
People are fucking idiots.
You lost your phone? Someone stole it? Sprint can help! If you want to turn off your phone, all you have to do is call them.
How about that? Just pick up the phone you lost, and give them a call. And when your internet is down, you can visit their web site!
So because I am nothing if not resourceful, I tried something else. I tried to sign up for the Family Locator Plan, which uses the GPS chip in your phone to tell you exactly where it is! Isn’t that great?
But the caring folks at Sprint want to make absolutely sure it’s you changing your plan, so they send you a new password, and you have to log in with it.
How do they send it to you?
THEY TEXT IT TO YOUR PHONE.
Can you even fucking believe that? They text a new password to the phone someone may have stolen, which means the thief now has access to all your account information, including your credit card and your social security number.
Oh, it’s just a wonderful system. And if you upgrade to the premium plan, Sprint will make an extra set of car keys, and send them to the people who robbed you.
At this point, it was clear that I had to get into a Sprint store and deal with this as quickly as possible. So I used Sprint’s store locator to find the closest store.
The web site returned a store about a mile from here.
And these were the driving directions they gave me.
Yeah. Still got a headache.
SPECIAL TREAT!
Long time ex-listener and Robitussin abuser Craig has gifted me - and by extension, you - with over 30 hours of April Winchell radio show highlights!
Yes, this iredeemable masochist has sifted through years of my dribblings, editing together 25 offerings, each over an hour and completely free of boring shit. And separate tracks make it easy to speed through crap that still seems like it’s going on far too long.
I’m uploading them as zip files, so you can download them and do whatever the hell you want to do with them.
I’ve got three of them up so far, and more will follow when I regain the will to live.
To find them, type “highlights reel” (with quotation marks) in the search box, or look in the radio show archives for 2003.
By the way, the radio show archives have been reorganized to make searching easier, so you don’t have to keep hitting “previous” to find shows from years ago.
CHAT ME UP
Last night, I wandered into our new chat room and had a fantastic time. There were at least 5 people in there who I absolutely love, and it was amusing beyond reason.
I’ll log on during the show on Sunday and we’ll chat during the breaks (just like old days on KFI!), but in the meantime, stop by anytime and see who’s hanging out.
I’ll probably be on later, but right now I have to drive 135 miles to buy a phone.
10 responses so far ↓
1 xlistnerliz // Oct 11, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Ah Mercury retrograde rears its ugly little head. YUP. All things communication/electronic will be fucked-up until Nov 1. I’m just sayin’…… … or, could be you just lost your phone.
2 Elmore // Oct 12, 2007 at 12:07 am
Apparently Sprint hasn’t changed much in the last decade or so.
Last year I got a call from a collection agency in South Carolina demanding the $168 they said I owed them. I had never heard of them and I called to try to find out what the debt was. They had bought my “bad debt” from another collection agency I had never heard of. A call to the second collection agency revealed that they in turn had acquired my “bad debt” from Sprint, who claimed I had missed a payment of $86.10 in 1996. The $168 was the original debt plus interest and penalties. I didn’t even remember whether or not I had been a Sprint customer in 1996. That’s a long time ago! I called Sprint and the operator said he didn’t know anything about me or a past due amount I might have owed, because they clear out their old records after two years.
Question: Could you prove you paid your phone bill in the month of September, 1996? The collection agency smugly offered to waive all the penalties if I just paid them the original amount. They must’ve bought the bad debt at a steep discount! But something struck me as familiar about this particular bill. I was going through a divorce in 1996 and my ex-wife had stopped paying the bills after I moved out. After a month or so I got the bills sent to me and paid them off. I still have the divorce records and lo and behold, there was a letter from Sprint from November, 1996 closing my account and showing the September bill of $86.10 paid in full. Sprint must have screwed up and sent my account to collections even though it was paid off and closed. I sent a copy of the letter to the collection agency who had no idea what to do about it. I am probably only person they’ve ever gone after who has been able to prove that he paid an eleven-year-old phone bill. Not knowing how to deal with that fact, they simply continued to harrass me, and I reported them to the South Carolina Attorney General who unsurprisingly has a long dossier on them.
As for Sprint, I’d have to say that for them Mercury is ALWAYS in retrograde…
3 Syr Paine // Oct 12, 2007 at 3:34 am
Sincerely sorry that you lost your phone. Good luck with that.
Platitudes over because I am SOOOOO FREAKIN’ HAPPY!
Now I can share REAL HUMOR with the stiffs out here in BFI(ndiana) who don’t get me! Who in the hell am I kidding? I will share, they won’t get it, and still won’t get me….
Someone get me a drink while I listen to my IPOD, laughing hysterically….
P.S. - A case of Robitussin is on the way to you, Craig! The kind with Guifennison in it, so you can be happily stoned while you sift endlessly for the gems!
4 emroki // Oct 12, 2007 at 7:57 am
I hear you–that Sprint website is useless except for paying your bill. I wanted to remove the equipment protection from my phone. (That’s another joke–you pay $7/mo all year long, only to pay a $50 deductible when you call in a claim. Then they send you a refurbished phone of a “comparable” model that is always worse than your original phone.) I finally found the page where I should’ve be able to remove the insurance option, but there was no way to do it. I ended up trading half a dozen e-mails with a “business e-care” rep who finally removed the insurance from my plan. What a headache.
My contract finally expired, but I’m skeptical that AT&T is any better (T-mobile is out of the question on account of their unbearable commercials).
5 Delphi/Pythia // Oct 12, 2007 at 11:13 am
The gods tell me that you will get a better phone, and they are not pleased with the the gods of Sprint… there will be a real Hellenistic battle soon!!…
We are very pleased with the new chat room and archives!!
Hail goddess April!! Hail goddess April!!
Pythia has spoken!
6 pal Jacky // Oct 12, 2007 at 3:23 pm
okay, dokey
Speaking of phones does anyone else have a problem with the ‘Always’ maxipad commercials? First there was a maxipad posing as a rollercoaster car. Now they have one bucking like a mechanical bull. What the hell do those things do to a female’s crotch? What comic says their name could be worse, It could be ’sometimes’ ?
7 jandu // Oct 12, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I use the ‘NEVER’ maxi-pad. That way I’m never disappointed. Never mind that I’m a man…..it still feels right
8 jim // Oct 14, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Congratulations, April - you seem to have determined the true length of the proverbial country mile. Shit.
Evil is real - Sprint: always a sure bet to win the “Worst Customer Service” sweepstakes … that archive fixup was a good move, even though I just retyped the numeral subscript in the Address Bar, because I’m such a little tit when it comes to stuff like that.
I zealously recommend the Yahweh-Brand OMNIPAD: “absorbs” heathens while you sleep & smites “those that pisseth against the wall” after you get up! Feel refreshed, feminine, confident - & vengeful! Girly, yes, but I like it too. Try the Myrrh-scented OMNIPAD for extra righteousness. It’s Apocolypso-riffic!
9 joshpincusiscrying // Oct 15, 2007 at 10:55 am
Ah, fucked-up people. I love ‘em. I recently started a new job in the marketing department of a fairly large east coast law firm. I am not a lawyer (nor do I profess to be one). During my second week on the job, I received a phone call from a local county office regarding services rendered and money they are owed for copies of records and documents provided. My name was on the invoice as contact person. The services occurred three months before I worked here.They said either me or another lawyer used the services provided. I told them I was not an employee of the firm at the time nor was I an attorney. They never called back.
10 katzinoire // Oct 15, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Yeah, gotta love those cell phone folk
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