It would seem that AOL is not the only company that makes it hard to cancel its service, as readers have been regaling me with many tales of similar experiences they've had with different vendors. And it probably won't come as a big surprise to you that quite a few of these stories involve the cell phone business, or that what is perhaps the saddest of them all is about Sprint.
"My wife and I had Sprint's service for the obligatory two years, but our phone had seen better days," a reader recently wrote. "It would no longer hold enough charge for five minutes of conversation. And we weren't big cell phone users -- you could probably count all the calls we'd made in two years on your fingers. So we decided that when our contract was up, we were going to look for a better deal. At the time, free phones for signing up for a two-year contract were everywhere, so we thought we'd cancel Sprint and look for a free phone, small bill and possibly roll-over minutes. But when we called Sprint to cancel, we got connected with a real smooth talker who promised us the world and delivered us to a collection agency instead."
The reader and his wife both talked to the Sprint representative to make sure they understood what Sprint was offering if they would stay with the service. "He said that if we renewed our contract right then, not only could we get a pair of free phones, he'd also give us a free month of service," the reader wrote. "He said that we could go to Wal-Mart or BestBuy and get free phones by merely supplying our phone number, or we could go to the Sprint store or Radio Shack, purchase the phones and at the same time pick up a rebate slip for the cost of the phones. Either way, in the end the phones were to be free."
Of course, it turned out there was a large measure of untruth in what the Sprint rep told them. "We went to Wal-Mart, and the clerk looked at us like we were crazy when we told her of the promised deal," the reader wrote. "So, she called Sprint, and we -- the clerk, myself and my wife -- went through one rep and two supervisors. All of them said that they knew of no such offer and couldn't do anything for us. So we told the last supervisor that if they weren't going to honor the new, verbal contract, neither were we and we wanted our service cancelled."
That cancellation over the phone didn't register with Sprint either. "So when we started getting bills, I wrote to Sprint and told them the same sordid story and they said 'too bad.' I never signed anything, and all they have, if they have anything, is my voice on tape, along with the rest of the contract we discussed, I would imagine. Now I've been turned over to a collection agency, and when I asked them for a copy of the contract that holds me liable, all they sent in return were copies of the bills for the months since all this transpired. The remarkable thing is that every bill shows absolutely no usage and still, they can't see the solidity of my side."
The reader, who is a CTO, admits he was a bit naïve not to realize that the Sprint rep would outright lie to him. "I now know that I should have done some things different, but most important of all of them, was to never have agreed to a deal over the phone," the reader wrote. "But I can't help but wonder if Sprint does the same thing with its phone support personnel that AOL just recently settled for?"
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