Sprint, a company the government can brag about being better than.

We've been with Sprint for all of two months. We've already logged over 10 hours of tech support. Oh no. I'm not kidding. How these people can not figure out why they are bleeding money is beyond me. Just walk into one of your stores Sprint! Simple as that. Look. Let me help you.

A few weeks ago, Mr S's Palm Pre stopped wanting to connect to internetty things. Like turn by turn navigation, and the Internet. He finally broke down and called tech support. Our previous experiences on tech support ate up hours of time. So deciding to call them was no small decision.

Three tech support guys (who all had him do the same thing-despite being landed in front line support and back line support) and two and a half hours later Mr S. is given a trouble ticket and sent to a Sprint brick store in our city.

We walk in, show the ticket number and ask for the repair department. The girl just looks at us, then around the store like "duh, you can see this isn't a repair store". We tell her customer support sent us there.

Oh yeah, she says -the customer support line has been doing that. The repair store is in the city next door.

She gave no hint she would call them and make them stop sending people to the store when there wasn't actually a repair shop there. Oh well. Not her job. Most people have nothing better to do with their lives anyway. Right?

We drive to the repair shop, and the guy tells us to come back in an hour. We don't want to do that, we leave a number to have them call us when the phone is fixed. After three hours we call. It's taking longer than expected. They will call us.

See why I didn't just want to drop back in after an hour?

Finally about 5:00, they call and say the phone is done. We hop over there. They hand us the phone. Mr S. asks "what did they do to fix it"?

The rep - I don't know, but it's fixed.

Mr S. - well, I want to know how they fixed it.

The rep - you know what was wrong with it.

Me - Can you ask the guy what he did to fix it?

He finally walks over and talks to the tech and Mr S. walks over too. The tech is behind this bank style bullet proof glass with holes and a tiny slot kind of deal. The tech tells him he wiped the phone. Mr S. responds that the techs on phone support already did that. So, the guy tells him he should test the phone before he leaves. Mr S. is kind of annoyed because if the tech would have read anything in the trouble ticket he would have known the phone was already wiped.

Mr S. tries his phone, and it still doesn't work. The tech takes his phone back and doesn't say anything to us. So we assume we are just suppose to wait around. This is where I start focusing on the employees. There are 12 employees in the store. One shopper. Three people including us on the repair side. And there was this other woman who was just hanging out.

Three of employees were just sitting around in the repair side. One was surfing on his phone. One was poking holes in his forehead with his fingers and rubbing his face like he was trying not to fall asleep, and the other was just hanging out with the friend. I immediately wanted to fire all these people.

Most of the other employees were trying to look busy by doing stuff on the terminals. Still - only one customer in the store. 12 employees.

Finally after 20 minutes they decided to swap the phone out.

The whole thing took all day. We finally got out about 6:00. I've spent less time in the DMV behind a hundred people in line in front of me. Sprint would make any government bureaucracy proud.