Porting Cell Number to New Carrier - What a Pain!

I have spent the last week trying to "port" my cell phone number from verizon to sprint. I don't know if anybody else has been through this much toil and trouble, but I hope it's not this complex for everybody.

When I got my new phone, the salesman said that in 4-6 hours my new sprint phone would start working and my verizon phone would stop. This was monday. 12 hours later I called customer support to see why my new phone wasn't working yet and was told that it actually takes 24-72 hours to port the number.
72 hours later (sprint phone still doesn't work, and now my verizon account has begun the next month of billing) I call customer service again, slightly more irate. I am told that the salesman had entered the old account number wrong, and although they had known this since tuesday they hadn't attempted to contact me. I give them the information again and I am told that my new sprint phone would start working at noon today (friday).
The service rep was halfway correct - my verizon phone stopped working but the new sprint phone still had nothing going for it. I called customer service one last time, as apparently they had to activate the new phone over the air (This information was never conveyed to me. I had to seek it out) and my new phone is finally working 120 hours after I got it, which is only slightly longer than the 4-6 promised by the salesman.

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The Customer Service Reps were actually very helpful, but the whole system just seemed terribly organized. At least I have two more years of this to look forward to.


If anybody else is thinking about switching carriers but keeping their number, be prepared to be lugging two phones around for at least a week!

 

I live in the middle of nowhere in "no Iphone for you" land, so my first choice is out of the question. Sprint's $99 "simply everything" plan seemed to be hard to beat: unlimited everything for a hundred bucks.

My billing zip code is in my area code, and I went to a store 5 miles from my house.