Following up on my inability to receive text messages on my Sprint PCS phone (see March 8), I called their super-secret tech support line this morning to check on the status. Thirty minutes on the phone with Candy (Candi?) resulted in:

• The trouble ticket that was filed last week said to notify me when it was closed. I wasn’t notified.
• My trouble ticket was closed with the notation “Customer does not subscribe to a text messaging plan, which is required in order to receive text messages on a 2g phone.” (2g being second generation–an “old” phone now that everybody’s moving to 3g.)
• Signing me up for a plan that allows 100 text messages per month for $5.00 didn’t help.
• When Candy tried to send me a text message, the system said that my phone is not capable of receiving SMS text messages.
• Candy filed another trouble ticket that will be handled in “three or four days.”

There’s a disconnect somewhere at Sprint. The system apparently thinks that my phone is incapable of receiving text messages, but then their online “lost my password” link sends messages to it just fine. The technical support people don’t know if somebody made a mistake coding the information for my phone, or if there’s some policy that is preventing text messaging from being enabled for 2g phones. The people who handle the trouble tickets just give a stock answer that may be correct, but it’s definitely incomplete.

All in all, I’m starting to think that Sprint PCS has finally internalized the legendary level of customer support that AT&T pioneered and Lilly Tomlin’s Ernestine character immortalized. Maybe Sprint figures that if they keep giving me the royal runaround, I’ll get sick of it and “upgrade” to a 3g phone. But I’m having too much fun now, calling their toll-free customer support lines and recording my experiences.

More to come, I’m sure.