It's never a good thing when large companies start irritating a bunch of their customers. It's much worse when they start alienating people who have a large forum to tell others what's going on that's bad.

In this case, though I rarely mention names, since it's not my gripe I'm going to bring light to it. Based on the story on the blog of Dan Farber, Larry Dignan and David Berlind on ZDnet.com, it would seem that Sprint has been kicking people out of their plan because of excessive roaming charges. However, this one group of people they kicked out were soldiers who had been sent out of town to train cadets.

This isn't the case of an over zealous customer service agent giving bad treatment to one customer; this is a bad company policy that basically tells people one thing, then changes it up whenever it doesn't fit their sense of the rules. Kind of like banks that give you a credit card, then decide to cancel it on you when you're getting close to the maximum that they gave you, and jack your interest rate up about 30 percentage points.

As I said, normally I wouldn't out a company by name, probably if it were about me. But these are military men, and I think the general behavior is deplorable to begin with, but doing it to men in uniform,... that disgusts me more than you could ever know. It never pays to provide bad customer service; it certainly never pays to provide bad customer service to those who honor our country in the highest manner.