This is absolutely ridiculous.
OK, last week, I placed an order for the Q9c and the $50/mo SERO plan. I received an email the next day saying it was backordered. I called to check on it to find out why & for how long, but no one could tell me any more than what the order status said - backordered. I tried calling 3 different times over the next week, and the third time, Monday, I got the lady to tell me why it was backordered. They were discontinuing that phone.
So she tried to transfer me to another dept, saying that I would have to pick a different phone. The transfer didn't work, but she had also given me a number so I called that & spoke to someone. Explained to them the situation - as best I could, since the lady was VERY hard to understand - and she starts doing...something. What exactly this lady did, I'm not sure. I do know it wasn't what she was *supposed* to have done. What she did was dark, an affront to nature. About mid-ways through her asking me questions, I tried asking her if she was placing a brand new order. She said yes - or at least, that's what I made out that she said. Since I had determined that my chances of her getting anything right in a order were slim to none, I asked if she could just cancel the original order (which she said she had done anyway) and let me place a new one online. She said yes, that would be fine, and told me goodbye.
This was the beginning of the end.
I waited to place the second order Tuesday morning, so I could settle on a new phone. Later that day, I received an email saying my order was on hold. I called to find out why, and was told that I had two accounts. I explained the situation to the lady, and she claimed she understood and would correct the issue. I didn't think much more about it.
Later that night, I get a call from Sprint. The lady on the other end sounds rather confused, and she starts asking me about the "number I had requested" and saying something about how this number already belonged to someone else, and was there a reason I had requested it, etc. I explained to her that I hadn't requested any number, didn't have a phone or service, and basically had no idea what she was talking about. I tried to explain my situation to her up to this point, and she pulls up my account - she says I have a credit for about $280 on my account.
Now I was really starting to get concerned. I pulled up my bank records online after hanging up with her, and sure enough, I see charges for the phone last week as well as the one I had just ordered.
About an hour later, someone else calls. She starts asking me the same kinds of questions about this number, and I kinda snapped. I told her that I had told the other lady I have no clue what they're talking, and all I know is that I've been charged twice for phones when I haven't received a single one yet. I tell her I'm pretty close to canceling it all and going with someone else at this point. She apologizes and tells me she's going to look into the issue, and will call me back in about 30 minutes.
She does as she says - her name is Maria, and she's the only sane person I have spoken to yet at Sprint. She gets all the details of the problem up to this point, and fills me in on the ones I'm not aware of. Apparently, somehow someone else's cell # had gotten on my account - as in another active number. So not only is she working to straighten out my 2-account problem, but she's trying to extract this line from my account. To do this, she has to call me back several times, but at least she's always very friendly and does as she says.
At about 9:00 last night she calls back and we really start working on the main problem. She has to transfer me all around Sprint, but she stays on the line the entire time as well. She has to put me on hold periodically, but she always puts me on "silent hold" so there's no hold music & I can still hear the third person. We go from dept. to dept., and every time the new person is completely lost. I stopped explaining the situation and just let Maria do it, since she knew it better than I did at this point plus she could throw in the Sprint technical jargon to them. Sometimes the person we dealt with would seem to sorta understand, sometimes they would be completely lost, and on at least one occassion they were extremely rude. Finally, Maria told me that someone should be able to complete the order at this point, so we transferred one last time (hoping each time this would be the leap home...
).
I got on the phone with a sales lady, but Maria had put herself on hold again. So I tell the sales lady we just need someone to complete the order at this point. She says ok, that doesn't look like a problem, and she does it. I'm pretty leery, so I ask her a couple of times if she's sure it's all squared away now, and she says "yes." She says goodbye, but I don't hang up - I wait for Maria to return from her hold. When she does, I tell her what has happened. She pulls up the order to make sure it was done correctly, but it turns out the lady somehow sent the original order back through - the one with the phone they no longer carry.
Maria tries to get her back on the line to fix it, but it's just after 10:00 now my time (11:00 Eastern, which is when that dept. closes) and she can't reach her. I can tell she's about as frustrated as I am - she says she promises she will fix this tomorrow, and she will call me around 6:00 (this afternoon). I tell her ok and thank her for her help.
Just a few minutes ago I got another phone call from a random Sprint lackey. The lady asks for my account verification info, in broken English, then proceeds to tell me that my order is on hold because I already have an existing account. I cut her off, tell her that I stayed on hold for over an hour the night before fighting the issue. I tell her that someone by the name of Maria is working on the problem, and that if she can't resolve it I'm canceling everything I have with them & going with another carrier.
It's rare to find a company this completely incompetent - I'm starting to think it might be worth the extra $$/mo to use a carrier that isn't staffed by trained monkeys.
all you naysayers, so far, I'm loving Sprint.
( So I'm back to picking a phone again. Looking at either the Centro or the Samsung Ace. Which of these is best, or is there another one I should be looking into? 
