How not to generate new business, the T-Mobile version

So, I had the unwelcome news that Sprint--they of the appalling customer service reputation--is buying out my prepaid mobile carrier, Virgin Mobile. Which would amount to survival of the fattest, except that Sprint's reputation seems to be catching up with them. Which in turn means that two companies, rather than one, will eventually crash and burn. Three, if you account for Helio being bought out by Virgin Mobile not so long ago. Go, capitalism. [wry look]

Thus, I'm in the market for alternatives. Tracfone's phones are decidedly un-sexy, even for frumpy ol' me. (a QWERTY keyboard, generous texting plan and web browsing are absolutely non-negotiable). T-Mobile looked somewhat promising, and a pre-paid plan to go with a cute little Sidekick phone seemed to fit the bill. (Scroll, if you will, to the bottom of this page to see that I'm not making this up. Yep, you see that it says "Unlimited domestic email, texting, IM and Web browsing" with $0.15/minute calling, right?)

Except that their website made it totally impossible to actually purchase a Sidekick plus a "Sidekick Prepaid" plan. Here, verbatim, is what I typed in their pre-chat questionnaire:

Why does this website make it so difficult to 1.) Buy a Sidekick and 2.) Sign up for the prepaid $1/day plan? The prepaid plans list that as an option, but nowhere do I find it, not even with the search feature.

When I pick the Sidekick and try to select a prepaid plan, the website just sends me in circles. I want a phone with a full QUERTY keyboard. I text and browse waaaay more than I talk. I'm looking for an alternative carrier now that (sucky) Sprint is buying Virgin Mobile.

Don't you think it would be a more viable business model to make it easy for me to send you money for a service I have come to value? Just askin'...

That generated a "no answer found" result, and gave me the opportunity to chat with a live representative. Except that this required a valid account number. Which I, as a prospective customer, don't have. Never mind that I'd selected "No" from the drop-down list in the pre-chat list that asked whether I am an existing customer.

The second time through the process, I faked it with my existing number and a bogus quartet of SSN digits. At the time of writing, I'm #80 in the queue. Ten minutes later, it's down to #60. At twenty minutes, I'm at #48. At thirty, I've clawed my way to 41st place. At forty, I'm averaging almost one place per minute, clocking in at #32. Fifty, I'm knocking on #26's doorbell. After a full hour, I'm 21st in line, and with that I lose my admittedly morbid curiosity to confirm that T-Mobile's [cough] "Award-winning customer service" is, in fact, a Darwin Award.

Mind you, I've been occasionally banging around the T-Mobile website the whole while, even going through the motions of pretending to add a Sidekick to my cart and running the advertised "$1/day" Sidekick plan to ground. No dice. It is simply not an option. I begin to suspect that I'm party to an experiment rather like the rat in a maze, except that there's no exit and the walls move like the trash compactor in Episode 4.

For the life of me, I can't remember the name of my Macroeconomics prof. from back in the tail end of the Reaganomics Decade--you know, the one engineered by the guy who just lost $13 million of his own money alone and barely escaped an SEC prosecution. Otherwise, I'd look her up and ask her to remind me again how capitalism is "the most efficient system for allocating goods and services."