Yesterday while sitting on hold to Sprint and it occured to me that excessive wait times (10 minutes or more) for phone companies are a bit silly. I mean, this is their business, so they can’t staff up for their biz? Their reliance on computers to man the phones before you can even navigate to a human is also questionable. I mean TAPI is cool if folks want to talk to a machine and do not wish to talk to a person, but if you are curious about the online billing showing that you haven’t paid your bill when your credit card statement reflects otherwise, well you don’t want to have a date with some machine telling you to press 1 for this and 2 for that. And what about how “0″ for operator is no longer in vogue? Yeah, let’s use some secret squirrel backdoor command! That’s customer service.

After 10 minutes a nice operator did finally come onto the line to assist me. After I explained that Sprint website shows my bill is past due when my credit card company shows payment was made 13 days ago, she said that “it can take up to 48 hours for your payment to show.” Then I politely corrected her, indicating that 48 hours would have been the 22nd of August and here it is the 2nd of September. She then corrected herself and said that they were actually doing “system upgrades” and that is why the internet was out of sync. Great, so their customers who login will continue to get wrong information for this month making them look like they are going to be penalized for paying their invoice late (see picture)? How about somebody taking 10 seconds of time and adding some text that the billing system might be out of whack so that their customers might think.

It’s no wonder some of these companies go under.

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