This weekend I learned an important lesson: don’t try to make a double phone switch moments before leaving home for the weekend. The call to Sprint went well enough and she assured me the changes would take effect within 4 hours. They didn’t, of course, because the agent had skipped the important part where I need to reprogram my phone with the new number. She said it wasn’t necessary, so I went along…doh, big mistake.
Coming home late Sunday night I discovered the next surprise: Sprint customer service is not open 24/7. On Sundays, for example, they’re only online from 9am to 9pm (Pacific time). The automated menu system is there, but real live humans are not. How can you be a telecommunication company and not have 24/7 customer support?
Luckily, there are plenty of searchable forums to help explain the programming sequence, so I got everything running again on my own. One good site in particular is the PhoneNews.com Knowledge Base which is a wiki that documents details for all phones sold by US mobile carriers. (Also: they’re hiring.)