William Reardon’s Blog

1. The local T-mobile store would match the price on Amazon, making it a pretty good deal, with a free headset thrown-in to boot.
   
2. Sang really wanted this phone when it first came out, but never got it. And, you know, the only thing better than a new gadget is a new gadget you can taunt your friends with. Alas, when I showed him I didn’t get the envious reaction I had hoped for. I had hoped to taste the sadness.
   

The best thing is that I’m absolutely free of Sprint and it’s Pretty Crappy Service (PCS). I missed several calls, wouldn’t get voicemail notifications until the next day, etc. A lot of that could have been my phone, but what finally pushed me away from them was their horrible customer service:

• I’ve never waited on hold for less than 15 minutes, regardless of when I call.
  
• The wait at their stores is worse their on-hold times.
  
• Their website is slow and clunkly.
  
• The customer service agents are unhelpful, know almost nothing about their products, and have problems if you ask questions that vear off their script.
  

Kick 1
I saw a promotion on Thursday for basically a free Treo 650 with a 2 year service contract. I’d been thinking of getting that specific phone and as that’s a great deal, I figured I’d stay with Sprint if I could get that phone for free. Problem was it was available only through the website, was expiring that day, and the website was broken & not taking orders.

Grah.

I tried back multiple times, and finally decided to call them. I spent over one hour and sixteen minutes on the phone, talked to seven sprint representatives, along the way being told:

• The logo on the webpage was the old logo so they couldn’t match it on the phone.
  
• The offer had expired as they had run out of inventory.
  
• The offer was never valid.
  
• The offer expired weeks ago & the date on the webpage was incorrect.
  

None of these ended up being correct, as the last person I spoke with (the 7th) said it was an affiliated dealer’s site, not Sprint’s, so they couldn’t do anything.

Fair enough, but couldn’t the prior six agents have told me that an hour ago?

Kick 2
At wit’s end, I explained to this final agent, in addition to today’s issue, that I had had a lot of frustrating issues with Sprint in the last six-twelve months (enumerating them all for her), and after having been a pretty reliable customer for quite a while, I was ready to leave and go to a different provider. If I called back again, it would be to cancel my service after signing up with another carrier, so if they had special offers for those calling to cancel and entice them to stay, she needed to let me know about them now.

She offered me a line that I was a very valued customer for having been a customer for six years and in appreciation of that, I could get a new phone with a $150 discount.

This was the same line another agent had feed me before. And having been fed it before I knew it wasn’t true. You don’t get the discount for being a valued customer, you get it for signing a two-year contract. It’s the same @*$% deal they offer to someone walking in off the street. (I discovered this the hard way, wasting a half-hour of my time, thinking I could get the Treo 650 for $300 off at the local Sprint store.)

So I confronted her on this:

Bill: The $150 is for signing a two-year contract, isn’t it?
Sprint: Yes, you would have to sign a two year agreement.
B: That’s the same deal you offer to anyone.
S: Yes, sir.
B: So you’re telling me the value you place on me having been a customer for six years is $0.
S: No, sir, that’s not the case at all. We’re offering you $150.
B: But you’re offering that to everyone!
S: Well, sir, we have given you rebates in the past. This would be in addition to those.
B: You have? When?
S: Sir, you received a $50 rebate when you first signed up in 1999.

I almost hung up the phone at that point.

After some more back & forth, the woman eventually offered 10% off the monthly rate & $100 credit, but by then I was sick of them. The deal I’d get switching to a different provider would better.

The final tip-off to how much Sprint sucks is the 2 year service contract they’re really pushing now. T-Mobile still only requires a one year.

It’s pretty obvious that Sprint is find a lot of their customers want to leave as soon as their one year contracts are off. A shame their solution is to strong-arm people into staying instead of offering a more compelling service so that people decide on their own accord.

Either way, good riddance Sprint.

What they don’t know is they let you take naps in the Egyptian coffins.

The facility was left as-is after the war, and for a while, forgotten. Maps used to track vital shipments still hang on the walls. Pinholes on the maps, left from the thumbtacks used to track each vessel, show the major routes, crisscrossing the Atlantic to and from the United States. Further on, in the intelligence gathering room, an officer’s log details the stress and day-by-day-by-day concern that if that morning would be the morning of an inevitable German invasion.

Today, of course, we know that not only does the invasion never come, but that the Allies ultimately prevail. Yet, walking through the bunker, you feel what it must have it must have been to not know either, the outcome of the war very much in question, German bombs overhead laying waste to the city, the daily battle with fear.

Like most museums, there’s a glass box at the end for donations. Donations for a museum dedicated to the man who personified the perseverance of a nation, the perseverance that was needed to win the war. A war that that returned freedom the European mainland – to France, to Czechlovokia, to Norway, to Poland – and thwarted quite possibly the greatest evil our planet has known.

So what filled this box?

Pounds? Euros from a grateful population?

Nope. It was neither.

It was American dollars.

I have to admit, if I lived in London, there’s a good chance you find me there every Sunday. Not that I could throw down on how the name of Mohammend is somehow tied to the Biblical name for the devil, but hell, for that, I’m willing to go back and do my homework. It reminded me a lot of college, with people staying up to 4am, debating & trying to defend absurd positions or playing devil’s advocate simply to see how well they could defend it or how the argument would shake out. A bit of mental masturbation, but pparently there was good reason to place the U of C in Chicago’s Hyde Park.

Yes, it’s beautiful, without a doubt it’s amazing, and it’s certainly it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, but who doesn’t know that already? And having heard it all before & seen it now, I can tell you, there is nothing — nothing — anyone can say that will compare to standing in the middle of that chapel and looking up at that beautiful ceiling. Even detailed photos pale in comparison to the real thing.

So what good is another post telling you more of the same?

For that reason, rather than give a blow-by-blow summary of my trip, and subjecting you to modern day vacation slide torture, I thought I’d do something different. For each day of the trip, I’ll pick a photo or event from that day and describe just that. I’ll try to pick things off the beaten path — things you can readily find on Yahoo Image Search by just typing in a few keywords. Vacations are often like a series of small vignettes strung together, so by giving some of the pieces you’ll get a sense of the whole.

(They also don’t allow photographs inside the Sistine Chapel, so yeah, this kinda solves two problems at once.)