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Oh yeah ... I've been meaning to mention that Sprint has a new bill-payment scheme in their stores that replaces the customer service desk. It's a bank of three ATM-like machines.
The machine has both a touchscreen and a keyboard with an integrated trackball. You can't, however, use the keyboard. It's apparently there only for the ineffable purposes of Sprint, presumably so that after the store is closed the employees can play head-to-head Minesweeper on the payment machines. The touchscreen is slow, imprecise and unresponsive; you can enter at most about one character per second. I'd be prepared to bet the whole thing is an Internet Exploiter kiosk application.
It takes between three and four times as long to pay your bill on one of these machines as it did to pay your bill to one of Sprint's service reps at the old customer service counter, and that's assuming you don't need assistance to use the machines. Both times I've been in and paid our phone bill at these machines, around half the people lined up to use the machines have required assistance to understand how to use the machines. This requires two Sprint customer service reps (you know, the ones who would have been behind that counter that the new machines eliminate) standing by to render assistance to customers who don't get the new machine. The machine does not give change, and takes only bills, fed one at a time into a slot on the face of the kiosk, thus forcing you to either overpay or underpay your bills if you pay in cash (unless your bill happens to come out exactly to an even amount). Because of this, those customer service reps periodically need to disappear out back into the office, behind a locked door, to make change for people who are two or three dollars short on their bill but have nothing else smaller than a $20 (or even a $50) bill. I had to get a ten changed myself. This slows things down even further. What's more, the bill reader will reject a bill for the slightest crease or dog-ear -- a sixteenth of an inch of any corner folded over in either direction (or, presumably, torn) is enough to trigger a bill rejection.
The machines don't take credit, debit, or ATM cards. They do, however, offer one way to pay your bill exactly: by check. After you write your check, the machine prompts you to insert it into a separate slot, then noisily scans and imprints it ... then, counter-intuitively, gives it back to you. The elderly woman on the machine next to me wrote a check, and despite repeated explanations by those Sprint service reps (you know, the ones replaced by these machines), she couldn't grasp that the fact the kiosk spat her check back out at her DIDN'T mean that her check was no good, and that her payment had in fact gone through, and she DIDN'T have to do the whole thing again.
Finally, when all is done, the machine prints out a receipt ... which it spits out through yet another slot. This third slot is buried down on the body of the machine at about waist height, underneath the shelf holding the built-in, bolted-down keyboard alluded to earlier -- you know, the one you can't use. The slot, and the receipt protruding from it, are invisible to an adult in the average height range standing close enough to the machine to use the bill feeder, the check imprinter, or the touch screen. I'm not unusually tall (5'11" or so, probably 6' even in my shoes), and I had to bend down to see under the shelf and find my receipt. To make matters worse, there's another slot (whose purpose is entirely unexplained) just under the edge of this shelf, which at first glance is where the machine appears to be telling you your receipt will emerge (and from which, needless to say, nothing ever does).
What was Sprint thinking when they designed these things? Or perhaps the more apt question is, WAS Sprint thinking? They don't speed up bill payment; they slow it down, by several times. They don't reduce staff, because the reps formerly staffing the customer service desk now need to stand by the machines to help people use them. And if you need to query something on your bill, I guess you're just SOL now, because there doesn't appear to be any way to do it with the customer service counter gone. (And I can vouch from past experience with it that Sprint's telephone customer service is bloody near useless for billing issues.)
But they sure look all modern and spiffy, standing there all in a bright shiny row.
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What they want you to do is give them your checking account number so they can raid it at their convenience. No siree bob....
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Share and Enjoy!
-Ogre
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