Shoot, I’ll bet they messed up my account when temporarily changed the phone on my line a while back.  Even though you’d think that changing phones shouldn’t make any changes to your plan features, it seems they always muck something up.  With a big sigh, I dialed up Sprint customer support (after not being able to find chat based support on their website anymore.)

I made my case and was put on hold for a few minutes.  They asked when I did the phone juggling and reiterated that changing phones shouldn’t change any plan features.   They found that time frame in my account and noted that Power Vision was already off the account at that point.  They said it was removed when I added some features to other phones in my family plan.  After saying that must have been an error, they asked if I wanted added back in.  I said yep, and they put me on hold again.

After a little wait, they came back and said I was all set and that they credited me back the difference between the Casual Data Usage and Power Vision charge.  Wow, I’m pretty pleased that I didn’t have to ask.  Good deal!

Pleasantly surprised that even though there were a bunch of cars in the parking lot shared with a few other stores, there wasn’t a sole in the Sprint store.  I head up the counter and I remade my case.  My cat busted my phone, it works ok, except it doesn’t ring, I don’t have insurance, and I really don’t want to pay full retail for another phone.

The guy started by saying he’d take a look at the phone, but wasn’t sure he’d be able to do anything.  He asked how old the phone was and I said less than a year.  He then said that the best thing to is probably to try to get Palm to do a warranty replacement.  I told him I was trying to see if anybody in town could do anything for me before going that route.  That and being so close to the 1 year timeout on the warranty, I’m pretty sure that they’d find a way to screw me.

I said, well, while I’m here can you at least take a crack at it?  He said, yeah it’d cost me $15 to open it up, even if he couldn’t fix it.  I said sure, guessing that it was probably something easy to fix after getting the phone open.  He said give him and hour and fifteen minutes and stop back in.  I ducked out and killed the time with aimless wandering in Lowes and Walmart locations nearby.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, I stroll back in.  He said, good news and ducked into the back room.  On his way back into the showroom I could already hear the blink blink blinks of him stepping through the menus to preview the ringer to show me everything was working.  Sweet.  So, I said how much do I owe ya, he said its $15.  Cool.

So, to help mitigate further calamities, do you have any Centro cases?  He had a nice gel jacket and picked it.  After ringing me out, he promptly moved my number from the backup phone back to the repaired phone.

All in all, I’m pretty happy.  My phone works again, and I didn’t drop a whole lot of money to make it happen.  I think Sprint Fairmont just became my new default location for when I need to deal with them in person.