I’ve got my cell phone on speaker-phone listening to really crappy ancient rock music (currently the BeeGee’s) — because music over the speaker phone is mostly noise. A customer service rep answered a few minutes ago and then told me that she had to transfer me to someone else by company policy. It turns out that she’s in Pocatello and she can’t assist Pocatello callers. So after waiting 35 minutes to talk to her, I’m now back in the queue waiting once again for someone else. The problem is not particularly urgent, just aggravating. When I dial *4 on the phone to see how many minutes I’ve used, the service repeats about seven times “You have used zero minutes on your free and flexible plan.” Then it says that I have unlimited night and weekend minutes and repeats that several times. The same continues for several other pieces of information, most of which is suspect. The first person to answer said that there was a memo about that somewhere, but that she couldn’t help me. Mighty strange. The other problem stems from combining all of our accounts. When Nina calls *4, the automated response is “That information is not currently available. Please try again later.” So, I’m writing in my blog while I’m waiting for Sprint to answer the phone.

There is a Convergys call center here in Pocatello. I wonder if they have the Sprint customer service account and that’s why the person first answering the phone was in Pocatello? Convergys recently announced that they were raising hourly pay rates for all their “associates.” The same announcement said that they were also beginning to allow certain people to work from home rather than having to come into the Convergys office building to work. I think they employ a couple hundred people, mostly college students, here in town.

Sprint finally answered and I’m talking with a fairly clueless person…. She says that I have to wait to the next billing cycle for the computer to “catch up”. It could be — I’ve heard worse explanations. I did make significant changes to my account on January 19th, which was the first day of this billing period. So, I have to wait to February 19th (a Sunday) to see if the computer has, in fact, caught up. Maybe I’ll remember to update this and determine whether I have to repent of calling the customer service lady “clueless”…. But, I am now finished waiting on Sprint customer service for this evening.