Category: Geekery

A few weeks ago, I borrowed Dan’s truck for a trip to Whitby to pick up my dad’s power tools that he doesn’t have room for in his new house. On the way out, I saw a HUGE traffic jam on the 401 in the return direction, so I took the 407 Express Toll Road on the way home. I figured I’d just get the bill from Dan when it came, and pay it. Big mistake.

It turns out that there is absolutely no way to pay this bill without creating some sort of account profile for Dan. I’m not Dan, and I don’t want to create a profile for him. I don’t know him well enough to answer the security questions, for one thing. Plus while it’s unlikely that he is going to be a regular traveller on the 407, I don’t want to be the guardian of his account (ie. I know the PIN) if he does. There is also no way to enter the name on the credit card – if it’s not the same as the person named on the account, it isn’t going to work. There is no way to just send in a check or, if you don’t call from 9-5 on a weekday, to talk to a customer service rep. It seems to me that driving a borrowed car on the 407 should be something that the systems designers might have anticipated happening once in a while and designed in a method to resolve this short of making the owner of the car pay.

I guess in future I should either remember my 407 transponder, or just risk the traffic jams on the 401.

When I call you to report that I can’t receive phone calls in my own home, and you decide to call me back, it probably isn’t a good idea to call me back on my Sprint phone, since, you know, I can’t receive phone calls when I’m in my own home. Is this a hard concept to grasp?

When I call Sprint support, the voice mail menu cautions me not to call with my Sprint phone because it might be needed in other ways to diagnose the problem. So why can’t you figure out that simple fact yourselves?

Update: It gets better! As well as leaving me a voice mail (which I got when I went out to run an errand), they also sent me a text message that says to reply to the text message to let them know when they can call me. When I attempt to reply to the text message, it tells me that it’s not a valid phone number to text. “Your MSG could not be DELIVERED because Invalid Destination Account”. Yes, with the StupidCaps(tm) and the fractured syntax and all.

just got off the phone with Sprint. Needless to say, I had to phone them from the house line because once again I’m getting no signal in the house for the cell phone. I’m currently having two problems with the phones –

1. We get signal in the house about 50% of the time, the rest of the time we get dropped calls and missed calls.
2. Currently (as in ever since I was using it plugged into the car’s audio system on Saturday), I cannot hear anybody who calls me unless I remember to switch to speaker phone. It’s as if it still thinks there is something plugged into the headphone jack.

Sprint’s answer to the first was “we’ll send a network engineer to drive through your neighborhood to see what the signal strength is”, which means he’ll probably see it during the few minutes per hour where the strength registers as 3 or 4 bars, and declare it fine. I asked about one of those pico-cells, and they want you to pay for the device, then pay a monthly fee for the privilege of using your own cable modem network bandwidth to fix their network limitations. Their answer to the second problem is that I need to bring it in to a Sprint store, so somebody can try all the trouble shooting steps that I’ve already tried and say “yup, it’s dead all right”.

Right now the only thing that’s preventing me from driving to the Sprint store and saying “give us our money back, we’re going back to AT&T” and buying two iPhones is that Vicki isn’t home yet so I won’t be able to slam both of them down on the counter.

It’s a real shame, because I love WebOS, I kind of like the Pre itself (although the battery life sucks and when I’m using the GPS and music it suck down power faster than the car charger can replenish it unless I turn off the screen), but I hate, hate, hate, hate the Sprint Notwork.

So to everybody within the sound of my voice, hear my cry: “DON’T SWITCH TO SPRINT – THEY’RE CHEAPER FOR A REASON!”