By
Ed Finegold
If I were selling hair gel door-to-door, my first stop would be every wireless carrier’s retail stores in my territory. Maybe I’m jealous because I lost my hair years ago. Maybe I just don’t understand current hairstyles. Regardless, I can’t understand why the guys who work in mobile stores (and it’s almost always exclusively guys in their 20s) look like they just came from a night out with Taylor Lautner, Justin Bieber, and a marketing rep for Axe Body Spray. It doesn’t scream ‘customer care’ to me, which is why I find Sprint’s new 30-day money back guarantee somewhat refreshing.
My 4G Disappointment
I’ve been pretty positive about 4G’s imminent emergence. When I realized I could snag one of those sexy new Sierra Wireless 3G/4G hotspots from Sprint and actually receive 4G coverage in Chicago I went for it. The online ordering process was simple. In thirty seconds, I even Googled a valid discount code for a $50 invoice credit. Within a couple of days, a slick black box arrived with my new device inside. I charged it up, followed the instructions, and it automatically connected to the 4G network and to my PC via WiFi.
“Brilliant,” I thought. “This is how things should work.”
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“But it’s 4G, I can take this anywhere. We can watch Hulu on the way to Michigan!” |
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I fired up my PC and…nothing happened. I could see the device as a WiFi network, but I could not connect to it. I tried turning off the security settings. That didn’t work. I tried a hard reset on the device to start over from what had worked the previous day. No dice. So I did what many people dread: I called Sprint’s tech support line.
My Tech Dumped Me
I told the tech to whom I was routed that I’d tried everything and just needed the code to restore the factory settings on the device.
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My wife couldn’t understand why it made me so happy to use the Internet through this new little gadget when our WiFi at home works just fine. “But it’s 4G,” I exclaimed. “I can take this anywhere. We can watch Hulu on the way to Michigan!” She smiled and said, “oh, that’s great honey,” and went back to chasing after our daughter.
Unfortunately, my excitement was short-lived.
In my office the next day, I switched the Altoids-sized box on and watched it connect to 4G…then fail over to 3G. I put it on the window sill. Bing! It swung back to 4G coverage. “Okay,” I thought, “I can live with that.”
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He insisted on walking me through all of the things I’d already tried. Of course none of them worked. In between each step, he put me on hold for five or ten minutes– probably to field and resolve other calls and protect his metrics. That’s my guess anyway. After forty-five minutes with no luck, I told him I’d continue to work the problem since restoring the factory settings hadn’t helped. He said he’d call me back in the morning.
To his credit, he did. We spent another hour on the phone going in circles, with him begging me not to fill out a survey I might receive to say he did not resolve my problem (I never received one). He finally decided to call in the big guns, or so I thought.
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