I got my latest Sprint bill today and noticed it was a little higher than normal. Turns out that Sprint charged me $18 to switch handsets; this is after I paid them $350 for the new handset! Do they not get it? On other carriers such as T-Mobile and Cingular, you can pull the SIM out of one phone and put it in another…you don’t even have to tell them. They don’t even have to know about the change as you do it yourself. Since Sprint and Verizon don’t use SIMs (or the CDMA equivalent which didn’t take off), I am forced to talk to a human to change phones; Sprint used to have the ability to do it online, but they scrapped that probably so that they could try to sell you something else while you’re switching handsets. Cingular is looking better and better everyday.

Yesterday I called my cable company to switch the IP address of my cable modem as I now have a block of 5 addresses and in order to use them, a change had to be made. I called support, negotiated the phone tree, and spoke to a woman with a heavy accent. I explained what I wanted done (my sales rep told me to call support to get the change made) and after explaining it a few times, I thought that she got it. She said she had to transfer me to a modem person and then when the modem person got on the line, he said “I understand you are having problems connecting to the Internet.” I told him that there was a communications issue and my connection was fine. So I got my cable modem reconfigured and things were fine.

I’m a bit tired of call centers that are either outsourced overseas or have people that aren’t native speakers. I have nothing against people speaking different languages; however, when I’m trying to explain a technical issue or get a problem solved, the language barrier makes it harder to get things done.