Now as a background, we own a pizza place. This is a strictly a delivery/carry out business which means we rely on our phones heavily. If the phones aren't hooked up, this is a major problem as far as us drawing in income. This hasn't prevented Sprint from accidently cutting off our service on many occasions. So, we hate Sprint.
As a bit more background, our business is not doing well. We're probably going to close up shop soon. (It happens. When your business is in a location that every job possibility has disappeared from and most of the people living there have picked up and left leaving something resembling a redneck ghost town, businesses don't do so well. Especially when you get robbed repeatedly and the police in your area adamently refuse to do anything about it. But that's a whole different Bad Service issue that would take me several very long posts to discuss.) One of the things we are dealing with right now is the fact that when it got really tight instead of closing up shop and paying taxes, we stayed open, paid our employees and didn't pay our taxes. We figured we'd catch back up in a few months. Don't do this, it's not a good idea. Just a fair warning for anyone thinking that might be a good way to go when times are hard with your small business. You will NEVER catch up. *grin*
So, the state will spontaneously put a block on our business account for a week and drain all of the money in there. You never know when it's going to happen. All you know is that you are suddenly in the negative and all of the checks you've got floating out there bounce. It sucks. But you deal with it.
Well, we caught it this time and we knew we had a check in limbo with Sprint. We call Sprint to pay just in case the check hadn't cleared yet. Oh no, according the Sprint the check has cleared. We are caught up and aren't required to pay again until the middle of June. Great, that's one stress off of our back.
Fast forward to yesterday. Get to work and there is no phone service. Yeah, Sprint shut off our phones. So, we call in to figure out why and see if there are any problems with the lines. Recording indicates everything is running fine. The only thing was assume at that point is that there was something wrong with our bill. We try to settle up. Except we can't.
Yesterday was Memorial Day so there was no one in the office to take our call. All of the billing people and everyone else were off. Great. So, even if Sprint was in the wrong about the fact that our check cleared (when we were told everything was good) we can't fix it anyway. Because there is NO ONE THERE! I'm still trying to figure out how they managed to get Memorial Day off. I've been in Customer Service for years and I've never gotten those days off.
We ended up just having the shut the store down yesterday. Without phone lines there is no way we were going to get much more than 3 or 4 walk in orders for the whole day, which isn't enough to justify payroll. That's an entire days sales down the drain.
If we can prove that this was Sprint's error I wonder if they can comp us the days sales we were out. Seems only reasonable.