On Friday, I came home to following letter:

This letter is in response to the Palm Pre that I bought and activated within the Sprint store – an hour after it became available. How dare they say that I haven’t activated in time? Without causing injury to other Sprint customers it would have have been impossible to activate it any faster.

Where does Sprint Rebates, who owe me money, get off sending me a letter saying that they aren’t going to pay and “no further action is required.” On a list of most obnoxious responses, I think this has to be at the top, right? I’m thinking of not paying my Sprint bill this month and instead sending in a letter that says, “You are not being paid because [insert a lie that would a valid reason if true], no further action is necessary.” I might give that a try with the copy of the rebate letter.

Nonetheless, it’s time to call up Sprint and find out what’s going on.

The first guy doesn’t know anything about rebates. He tells me that it’s another number. I realize that rebate-handling is typically outsourced, but I don’t want to talk to the third party and have them tell me that I didn’t actually by the phone and have it activated. I argued for a minute and then decided to see how the Sprint Rebate company would go.

After about 15 minutes on hold with the Sprint Rebate company, they found the problem. They had mistaken one of the digits of my phone number – entered it in as a 6 instead of a 0. Being that it was their mistake, I figured, they ‘d be rushing out a check to me right away. Not so. They said that they’d process it in the next 15 business days. I have to wait three weeks for their mistake? Here’s how the rest of the conversation went:

Me: Overnight the money.
SR: Sorry can’t do that.
Me: Overnight the money.
SR: Sorry can’t do that.
Me: I’ll have the money in my hands in the next 15 days?
SR: We’ll process it in the next 15 days.
Me: I’ll have the money in my hands in the next 15 days?
SR: We’ll process it in the next 15 days.
Me: You realize that I my money shouldn’t be delayed based on your error.
SR: Sorry there’s nothing else we can do.

I realized that there’s nothing more I can do either. I suppose I can think twice about using Sprint in the future. In fact, I’d say there’s a high likelihood I’ll do that as soon as mine and my wife’s contract is up.

That might be a little over-reacting to this incident, but they’ve taken away my grandfathered billing plan because I got a new phone (note to carriers – new phone should not equal new plan). Sprint is still the cheapest as far as I can tell, but it’s getting worse and soon I will pay more to deal with a different company.