Bob, Bob, Bob. It’s less than 24 hours until T-iPhone-0. Is this really a good time for you to alienate your best customers?

I went to your retail store to spec out the Nokia UMA phone, or as you guys call it, the Hotspot@Home. Talk about a phone UI that made my eyeballs bleed; to think there was a time when I was an admirer of Nokia design. But I decided to grit my teeth and hope that I could strip out enough of your ill-advised graphics to make the phone workable.

But the real problem came with the sales experience—or rather, the complete lack of a sale that accompanied your sales experience. I was pretty much ready to just buy the damn phone provided you had a decent return policy. Too bad your sales rep talked me out of it.

It was bad enough that it took me a while to derail your rep from the network promos to the phone I had come for—he quite literally wouldn’t stop until I said, “Look. Phone first. Network next. Maybe.”

Seriously, Bob, you’re selling me a phone that lets me use Wifi instead of cell minutes. Do you really think it’s a good time to try to lock me on a new contract right now before I’ve had a chance to see what this phone does for me? What exactly is the mean IQ of your customer base?

But then came the breaking point:

Me: (pointing to the demo phone, which is now showing “Application Access Not Allowed”) I read in an online review that T-Mobile was blocking access from Opera Mini, so I tested it out on this phone.

Sales rep: What’s Opera Mini?

Me: Full web browser, the most common application I use on my current Motorola.

Sales rep: Oh. Right. Well, that’s the demo model. They frequently don’t install the entire OS on the demo models.

Bob, I could relay for you the rest of the conversation, but that would really just be a waste of time. Because when one of your employees first demonstrates that he is less knowledgeable than I am, and then proceeds to try to drop me into a steaming bucket of horseshit, you’re not just losing a phone sale, you’re poisoning a customer relationship.

Point 1, your staffer lied to me, Bob. Point 2, I’m the kind of guy who gets pissed off by that, partially because it annoys me that you do that to other customers who don’t have my expertise. Point 3, not only are your hardware offerings weak, but now I have to stop telling my clients that T-Mobile has a track record of not crippling phones. You’ve crippled the one I was going to buy, in a way that makes me not want it anymore. Point 4, I’ll remind you that EVDO is faster and AT&T has the iPhone.

I can think of one and only one reason why I’m a T-Mobile customer today, Bob, and that’s your hotspot network. But I’m looking pretty hard at Boingo now that they’ve got that free global roaming in place. I’m sort of running low on loyalty options. Planning on addressing that?