Why I hate Sprint, Part MCXXIV

As it turns out, the company did announce a new name on Friday.  Apparently, they didn't deem this important enough to even send an e-mail to the contractors.  The new name is better than the interim name  (which had a connotation of cascading failures), but it's one of those made up word names.  That said, it does not annoy me, and that's something in itself.  This is not to say that it's good, merely that it's not as dumb as Cingular or Accenture or Agilent, but it's still dumb.

Notably, I see no person or cube sporting  branded crap.  That's kind of weird.

So, back to Sprint, to whom I wish the white hot pain of 1000 deaths.  I picked up the phone in Reston to call them and found I had no dial tone.  That's right:  both of our local phone lines are now dead.  I couldn't believe it either.

I used the cell phone to call Sprint and found out that they had indeed cut off the phone for non-payment of a bill that's 2 weeks late.  That means they cut it off before I got the new bill.  Which didn't have any threats of disconnection on it.  I also received no threats of disconnection under separate cover.  

Do I need to say that they took the liberty of charging us a reconnect fee, you know, since they'd gotten the payment 5 days after they'd cut off the phone.  Do I need to say that this is a scam to punish the forgetful?  None of the RBOCs couldn't get away with such a thing.  Consumer protection agencies would be on their ass so fast that they wouldn't know what hit them, but Sprint...they can do whatever they want.

Those of us who had Sprint Spectrum service in Washington (this was a regional GSM phone service they offerred for a while and replaced with a quasi-national PCS system) will remember that they lost a class action suit over this sort of behavior with those customers.  Oh, I'm so tempted.  If I had any choice whatsoever, I'd tell Sprint to go hang, of course, but because we don't really have choice in local phone service, we're just fucked.

Since we have the ISDN line in Front Royal, we don't really need the POTS line, but we've given that number to people, and dammit, the ISDN line still comes from Sprint so it wouldn't be a clean break anyway.  I will defer to Tino's decision in this matter because I simply cannot be made happy by any solution at this point.  Ironically, the ISDN bill was paid on the same schedule but was not cut off.  That means they enforce the stiffest rules against their most marginal customers (this is service in a rural area, remember).  What motherfuckers!