When SPRINT Said I Changed My Plan

I understand that I'm a "dinosaur" because (even though I am employed in Information Technology) I don't succumb to every new (and not so new) technological trend. My wife and I have cell phones and I get a good price on my plan because I've had it for a long time and we don't have any extras. Our phones are just phones. They are not portable computers that have voice/calling as one of the apps. So when Sprint emailed me that I had changed my plan a couple of weeks ago, I immediately called customer service to find out what was going on. The people at customer service asked for verification of who I was by a code word established years ago. I gave the person the word and she was unable to "authenticate it." Though I was calling on the phone in question about a change that had obviously been made, I was forced to go to a Sprint store. At the store, I was able to use my ID to establish a PIN and to find out that my plan had been changed to Unlimited Talk and Text. My concern was if the price had also changed and I was told it was "basically the same." Later, armed with my new PIN I went online and learned that my "code word" to "authenticate" my identity had been hopelessly misspelled by another of the customer service personnel.

So in the meantime, I began to use the text feature which I had previously had turned off when it was costing 10 cents per text. Now that I had Unlimited Talk and Text, why not use it right? So after a time I decided to use my new PIN and check on my account to make sure the cost had remained "basically the same" for the "Unlimited Talk and Text" plan that I had not authorized the change for. But the cost had changed! So I contacted Sprint and found that the new plan "was basically the same," except that text messages were costing 20 cents apiece. I was, of course, not at all pleased by being misinformed and duped into paying more. So I made them refund the extra charges for texting, turn off the texting feature and "basically" put things back to where they were before Sprint said "I had changed my plan."

So I'm back to being a "dinosaur" and annoying friends and family who want to text message me. Along the way my opinion of phone companies remains the same as well. They are all crooked.