Q:Be.Do.

8/21/06: Post 1.009

I walked into the Sprint store last week with a very simple and straightforward goal: turn our existing three cell phone lines on two different carriers into two lines with Sprint. It is a long and convoluted story, but Michele and I had two existing numbers on Sprint, and I had another line on MetroPCS.

I had been waiting for seven months for our Sprint contract to expire so I could be in the driver’s seat on this conversation. Of our three phone numbers, my old 509-xxxx number on Sprint was going to disappear, replaced by the 626-xxxx number that was with MetroPCS. 626 was going to be ported over to a Treo 700p, and Michele’s 225-xxxx number was going to remain unchanged.

I was the ideal customer: I had done my research, I knew what phone I wanted, knew what plan I wanted, and knew what upgrades to our service I wanted. And it wasn’t like I was trying to buy on the cheap. The Treo 700p is one of Sprint’s most expensive phones, and the data and service plan that comes with it is nothing to sneeze at (but still the best plan of all the providers I looked at, and trust me, I looked at all of the ones I’d be willing to give my money to).

Lin, my lovely sales associate, was most helpful. In order for me to keep an outgoing message on 509- informing people that the line was dead and to call me on 626-, she added the line to the account sans contract so I could kill the line at any time. It was, as she demonstrated, the most cost-efficient way to keep an outgoing message on that phone. Keeping the phone active would cost $0.00 per month – all other options started much higher.

Lin also discovered another way to save an additional 15% off of our phone bill every month. All I had to do was add another line to our account. This fourth line would come with a free phone, and would basically cover the cost of data for my Treo every month.

I laughed heartily. I tried to reason with her, “We’ve already got three lines, can’t you just give us the discount for not taking the fourth phone?” I tried everything I could to not wind up with a fourth phone line tied to our account, all to no avail. If I wanted to save the extra 15% I needed to activate a new third line with Sprint. Simply already having three lines active was not enough.

To make matters even funnier, Lin’s Castro Sprint store was out of Treos, and I had to go to the store in the belly of the Metreon Parking structure. A trip that was well worth the drive, because Jeff, the bad ass mofo who helped me out, cut me an extra 100 minutes per month, and an additional $10 off my data plan for all of my hassle and efforts. Bad ass as he was, he couldn’t get me that third line discount without taking the new phone number.

I tried to get a fifth line and another 15% off per month, but Jeff wasn’t having it. It turns out there are limits to the amount of excess Sprint is willing to give you in order to get you to save a buck or three a month. I don’t even know what the new phone number is. I have it laying around here somewhere, but I’m not going to use the phone. For phone calls, anyways.

We’ve been in the market for a new alarm clock for a couple of months now, and simply haven’t gotten down to Brookstone to use the gift certificate we got as a present recently. This new Sanyo phone, however, has a very pretty ringing alarm built-in, and the price was absolutely right.

All of this would have been ridiculous enough in its own right, until I called Comcast to get rid of our cable television service after we got DirecTV…