Purchased a Blackberry phone w/pre-paid monthly service plan from a major local electronics distributor. The phone was fine 1/2 mile or further from my house. There is a tower up the street at the top of the hill.

Despite repeated convoluted contortions through their HORRENDOUS customer service helpline (can you get away with calling it that if you don't get help?) I was ultimately unable to resolve the problem which apparently plagues me and perhaps 20+ neighbors.

One day (and I did have occasion to speak with them every single day) I was passed through 54 different operators of one sort or another (tech, manager, field rep, assistant, etc.) over a period of [OM*G!] 6.9 hours
and
EACH
TIME

was asked to

verify (which I understand) my info,

restate the problem,
go through the exact same prompts they must have in the database for first checking all the settings,
then AGAIN checking the phone for hardware errors,
hard and soft re-booting the phone,
taking out the battery to read numbers printed in 3 point type

~ you're getting the drift.

The conclusion of these many calls was

either

to open a trouble ticket only to later claim to have been unable to reach me or that the ticket was erroneously opened because there was an outage in the area . . .

OR

to just tell me there was an outage (local, regional, national, Blackberry-related and/or Boost/Sprint-related).

I vascillated from feeling used and amused to outright homicidal when BoostMobile-Blackberry Support SUPERVISORS hung up on me and were
"just off shift"
"unreachable"
"unavailable"

OR

~ you'll LOVE this one! wait for it . . .~

!!! nonexistent !!!
when referenced by name and badge/employee number! LMFAO

I hope someone with stock invested in these companies is outraged enough to forward this to someone at any of those companies who might want to change things.

I would think that Blackberry *might* want to withdraw hardware, software, support supplementation, etc. if this is how either the monthly prepaid plans or BoostMobile/Sprint is going to hang them out to dry.

If I can't return this particular Blackberry-branded BoostMobile for lack of a return code because the last supervisor hung up on me and the next one had such a poor connection he didn't feel the need to call me back after I made him repeat the land-line phone number I was using three times, perhaps I will sell it on Craigslist. I always wondered why there are so many phones on CL!

I am absolutely so fired up that I will be tenaciously following up with the FCC, FTC, my senator/congressmen, my mother-in-law's uncle's baby-momma's booty-call, y'all, Boost, Sprint, Blackberry, BestBuy and anyone else who will listen.

Tell ya what - for every minute of the last 30 days I spent giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to work the thing out - let it be my staunch commitment to my own form of therapy that I should AT LEAST put the same persistence, time and trouble into vindicating [insert evil grin here] my self-esteem that they put into obfuscation, avoidance, and doin' da dooty dance!

:P