My phone has been crapping out on me lately. I'm not eligible for an upgrade and I don't have a lot of money, so I bought a cheap second-hand phone. After a few mishaps (protip: don't buy a phone on eBay), I got one that should have theoretically been easy to transfer over to. As it turns out, there was a problem with the SIM card that wasn't letting me activate the new phone. I don't know anything about SIM cards, so I made the obvious choice and fucked around with the phone until I broke it some more. I figured I was in over my head, so I took it to the Sprint store to have them activate it, since I was clearly not doing a good job.
Long story short, the store was useless. They told me they couldn't do anything so I had to go online. Great. I went back online, and the "online chat" feature was unavailable due to high volume. Great! Thanks to some Google searches, the conclusion I came to was that I needed to reset the SIM card so that I could use it on my account. The details are really boring, but the whole point is that I came across some random site, punched in a bunch of random numbers in the keypad (I literally don't even know what they mean or what function they serve), and I managed to reset the SIM card and activate the phone. I honestly expected the thing to stop working completely, but instead I managed to pull off in about 10 minutes what Sprint couldn't figure out through 10+ activation attempts, an in-store visit and an unavailable support chat.
What the hell is the point of your service if you can't help a customer solve the most basic of problems? The guy in the store took a photo of my driver's license to prove my identity and couldn't even get access to my account. I googled a bunch of random shit and tried a "tap and pray" technique and I was able to diagnose and fix multiple problems in almost no time at all (I've only had the phone for exactly 24 hours). I dunno, this is more of a rant than anything. I guess the point is that I'm great and Sprint sucks. And now I'll enjoy that success by playing with my new phone.