A laughable (attempted) upgrade with Sprint
I’m keeping Sprint, at least for the next four months, long story won’t go into it. I’m also a blogger who writes about the HTC flagship line of products. I decided to get the HTC 10. I can always sell it later. Don’t cry for me on the Sprint network as actually they seem to have fixed my area.
TL;DR this goes over everything wrong with Sprint’s website I found in ten minutes and it’s really long and at the end I’m informed I’m not getting the phone when they claimed I would.
Anyway, I got on Sprint today for an upgrade and it suggested I look at a new better plan. My current plan for two lines and unlimited data and minutes was costing me nearly $117 a month after taxes so they suggested I upgrade to their $75 plan for $120 dollars a month pre tax (about $140 a month after taxes).
The line “$75 unlimited plan: $120” still clicks me up.
Ummmm… think I’ll pass.
Looking at the plan showed the extra line was $45 but still it’s a silly thing to offer an upgrade to a plan that’s more expensive at the same features. I think the Family share plan I’m on was discontinued, but still this just looks wrong.
Anyway, moving on and not switching plans I chose the $120 savings on the HTC 10 with the 24 month plan. Therein I saw the gotcha…it’s 23 months at $21 a month followed by a final month’s payment of… $21…. seriously? OK, this was just me being easily amused at unneeded complications.
I got to the final page and it said that this was a lease. I wasn’t about to pay $504 plus tax for a leased device that I had to return or pay off at the end of term, so I got on with Sprint support chat and typed with a support rep and explained the situation. The rep assured me (as shown in the photo here,) that it’s not a lease and you own the phone at the end of contract. It’s just something that’s put up on the website for anything involving a term.
OK, so I now go ahead and agree to the terms of the contract, which according to it I can break the term and pay off the full amount any time with no penalties:
Prepayment: You may prepay this Installment Agreement in whole or in part at any time without
penalty. Unless a different method is required by applicable law, all partial prepayments of this Installment
Agreement will apply to your installments in the reverse order in which they become due, which means the partial prepayment will not defer your regular scheduled monthly payments or reduce the amounts of such regular scheduled monthly payments, but may reduce the total number of payments remaining and/or the amount of your final payment.
OK, good to know for next month. I’ll just slap down a card and prepay this silly discount away. I’m not linking the contract pdf, it’s filled out with my info and other than that you can hit me up on hangouts at nopking !at! gmail dert com I’m not wanting to broadcast my info everywhere. I’m also keeping the chat transcript in case Sprint comes back and tried to claim it was a lease.
I get to the payment page, authorize a payment for $53.61 on my credit card to handle taxes. I set the thing to ship to my work, and bam. I get a text from Sprint a minute later informing me my $46.62 charge ($6.99 difference,) was processed successfully as well as that I have a $504 account credit.
I don’t have any problem with a lower price, but it’s not what I was expecting and now I have to wonder if there’s going to be a $6.99 charge somewhere as that seems like a corporate made up balance.
A popup comes up asking me to complete a survey. I click it and am told the survey is closed.
I skipped a few things involving the website requiring me to sign in several times, the chat window claiming that the delay to get a rep on was that it had to “establish a secure connection” instead of “hold on, we’re finding someone we can call Amanda for you”. Finding the back button on the browser left a phone/device in limbo that I had to locate the cart to deal with as opposed to the error messages telling me that there’s a phone in the cart, click here to fix it.
A while later I got the chat transcript emailed to me. It wasn’t what I’d seen. There were two lines missing from the beginning involving the initial greeting and then that it was trying for a secure connection. There also were several lines after we’d concluded our conversation and I’d purchased the phone, closed the page, indicating that Amanda had never been notified by Sprint’s website that the purchase was complete or that the window had closed on the customer side.
In the end I might get the phone, it claimed 1-2 business days when I purchased it and then I just got this email that says it’s been delayed.
And oh wait – I was charged $53.61 according to my credit card note that just showed. So where the texting software got $46.62 I have no clue.
