Phone Roam Grone

By Ed Lowe

“So, tell me,” said the man next to me. “Why do you use Sprint?”

I was waiting for my dinner guest at Abel Conklin’s, in Huntington. She had just called me on my cell phone, prompting my Sprint whine.

“Why do you have Sprint?” he insisted. “Why ‘Sprint’ in the first place? Why not switch to a service that works?”

“Sprint works…most of the time.”

“Most of the…?”

“I don’t remember why. I don’t think I started off with Sprint. I’m with Sprint, now, because…because I’m with Sprint, now. If I dump Sprint, I have to pay $150 for breaking a two-year so-called ‘contract.’ Every time you talk to these people, or get a new phone, or agree to a new rate package, you agree to another two-year contract. If you belch into the phone, boom, you’re in for two more years.

“They charge for using Sprint. They’ll charge to stop using Sprint. They charge extra for using Sprint when Sprint doesn’t work, and they charge a penalty when Sprint forgets to send last month’s bill. I’m afraid they’ll charge me for telling you that they charge me.”

“Slow down. What actually happened?”

“I come home Monday night, and I have mail on the floor.”

“You have mail on the floor?”

“That’s another story. I had a metal mailbox, mounted outside the front door, on a brick wall. The mailbox opened down, like a puppet’s mouth, rather than up from the top, like a normal mailbox. Whenever it rained, my mail got wet. I had to peel open my bills and dry them in the microwave. I whined about it, but I never did anything about it…”

“As with Sprint…”

“Stop. The mailbox was fastened to the wall by two large screws in the bricks. None of the mailboxes in Home Depot had holes that fit the placement of the screws, and I didn’t want to drill new holes in the bricks.
So, I put up with wet mail for 10 years…”

“…Until?”

“Until my mother got wind of it and bought me a brass mail slot for my birthday and had it installed in my front door, as a present. So, now, I have dry mail, on the floor. Satisfied?”

He shook his head, disconsolately.

“Now,” I resumed, “in Monday’s dry mail on the floor, were two matching yellowbordered envelopes from Sprint, both entitled: ‘Your Sprint PCS Bill Enclosed.’

Neither envelope was postmarked. As far as I know, Stan Sprint hand-delivered both envelopes. In one, I found a bill for the period from March 13 to April 12. That was $220.45. In the other was a bill for the period from April 13 to May 12. That was $463.86. It included the amount of the earlier bill, plus a new amount for the more recent bill, plus a late fee of $11.02, for not having paid the earlier bill.

“So, I called 1-800-blah-blah. I heard the menus and kept hitting ‘zero,’ until I got a living lady and told her that I had just received two Sprint bills in the mail on the same day and a late fee for not having paid the older one. She looked up my account and confirmed, somehow—I don’t know how—that I had in fact received two bills on the same day, and she explained that I had received them on the same day because of a ‘glitch’ in the system. A week later, I talked to a Sprint ‘spokesperson,’ Mark Elliott, who said ‘glitch’ was a mischaracterization on her part, because it implied a computer problem, which he said my problem wasn’t, but he couldn’t explain why I received two bills on the same day.

“I say to the 1-800-blah-blah person, ‘So, you’re charging me 11 bucks for your glitch?’

“‘No,’ she says. ‘In fact, I’m going to credit your account, right now, for the late charge.’

“‘Thanks. But you would have charged me the $11 if I had not seen the extra charge and called you?’

“She didn’t answer that. I say, ‘As long as I’ve got you on the phone—and I apologize for this in advance, because I know you don’t deserve it—how is it that I have a separate category on my more recent bill, titled “Roaming Call Detail While in Jacksonville, Fla.,” charging me more for those calls? If Sprint can’t get my Sprint phone to work, Sprint charges me more?’

“‘We don’t have a tower there,’ she said.

“‘Well, I’m sure you have a tower somewhere in Jacksonville. It’s a pretty big city. I happened to have been in St. Augustine Beach, south of Jacksonville, where my cell phone worked mornings, but no other times, unless I pressed “1” to permit roaming charges.’

“‘Well, that’s true with any service,’ she said. ‘If they don’t have a tower in the area…’

“‘…I have to pay more.’

“‘…Sprint, for instance, has to use another system.’

“‘…And I have to pay more. And, when I’m back home, here on Long Island, in Amityville, and I ROAM to lunch at
Runyon’s, in Seaford, or I ROAM to dinner at 18 Bay, in Bayville, or I ROAM from Huntington to Syosset on Woodbury Road, I have to pay more. And, if I get fed up and quit Sprint and sign up for, say, Verizon Wireless, I have to pay for getting fed up, too.’”

“What did she say to all that?” my friend asked.

“She apologized. I apologized, too.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Whine. I just did it.”

He shook his head, disconsolately.

“…What? You want I should quit, pay, and then go through the same headache with Verizon, or Nextel, or Cingular, or, whatever? Give me a break.”