I have a deal with myself that when my contract with Sprint expires early next year, I’m taking my phones and throwing them into the Mississippi River (or finding some other elaborate means of destruction that I can video tape). I’ve been with them four years and have watched them deteriorate from a forward-thinking and “cool” provider to the Pabst Blue Ribbon of cell phones.

But what amazes me about Sprint is not that it seems to blow the hard stuff, but how badly it messes up the easy things.

Let’s say, for a second, that you took a quirky picture of your beloved family dog on your Sprint phone. You wanted to send it to your good friend but knew she doesn’t have picture mail on her phone (or, in my case, suffered from bad reception). So, you decide to email it to her and, being the lazy sort, you decide to do it from your phone directly rather than download it to your machine and then email it yourself.

Let’s change perspective and take a look at what you just put your good friend through and the steps they have to complete to get the image.

Step 1: Open the Email

This step seems straightforward enough, we open the email and take a look at what is inside:

The astute among us will immediately spot three problems with this email:

1. The image is not attached, in fact, there is no attachment at all.
2. The email is in HTML format, something many cannot read and others actively block.
3. The email loads up a low-resolution copy of the image you want to send but makes room for a nice big Sprint logo

Great, my friends on dial up really love this already.

From here you are given five options. However, only one of them, “View Picture”, has anything remotely to do with downloading or seeing the full image. So, inevitably, we click that link.

Step 2: View Picture

Ok, we’ve clicked on the “View Picture” link, sat there while our browser opens up and then loads this excruciatingly heavy page (taking longer than 30 seconds for me to load on a DSL connection).

The image is now slightly bigger but still nowhere near its full size. Even with my cell phone camera, I can capture images twice as big as that.

However, what is most asinine about this page is that it loads up a heavy JavaScript gallery/slideshow viewer for ONE image. This kind of gallery system is a waste on multiple image messages but looks completely ridiculous when you only send a single one.

But then comes the question, where do you go from here? You can right click to save the image, but it isn’t the original. However, there are no other options, no download button, no “view full size” option, nothing.

As it turns out your next steps is completely counter intuitive, you have to click “Done”.

Step 3: Click Done

“Wait a second,” you say, “I’m supposed to click ‘Done’? But I’m not done. I haven’t actually done anything. I’m nowhere near finished, I want to download it, I want to view it full sized. I’m not done.

But according to Sprint, you are, at least with the slideshow.

Clicking done will take you to this page.

Now things start getting really stupid. You go to a page where you get to select the image you want. Nevermind that, once again, we only have ONE image. You get to tick the images you do and do not want.

But what do you get to do with them? Well, the biggest button tries to take you back to the slideshow and you see a drop down where you are presented with the option to “Order Prints”.

But you don’t want to order prints, you have a printer. You want to download the image, the actual full image that was sent to you.

Well, you’re in luck, you can do that here, you just have to click on that dropdown and you’re given the option to download the image or “view original”.

Now let’s pause a second here. That is two options for doing the exact same thing. The only difference is that viewing the original takes you to another JavaScript-heavy gallery page where you view the image full size.

Why are there two options for the exact same function and why does one require me to load a ton of JavaScript when it doesn’t even do anything to the image? It doesn’t make any sense

Still, knowing that “View Original is a useless trap,you decide to download the image.

Step 4: Download the Image

You select download and hit “Go”. A dialog box appears that tells you that your download should begin soon.

Note that there is no way to start the download manually should something go askew and that the best advice Sprint gives you should your download dialog not appear is to “try again”.

Once your browser pops up to download the file, you notice something else amiss. The file isn’t a jpg or a png, but a zip.

Bearing in mind, once again, that we are downloading just one file, there is no reason to zip it up. According to my Mac, the zip file is less than 10k smaller than the 200k image file.

So now you have a file on your hard drive, but, alas, you are still not done.

Step 5: Extract the Zip

Ok, extracting a zip file is not exactly rocket science, but it is an extra hassle, especially when you’re just trying to get at one file.

But when you finally get around to extracting the zip file, you’ll notice that there is something odd about the file itself. The extension is not a .jpg, but rather, a .jpeg.

That means, as one last step you have to rename the file.

Step 6: Rename the File

Finally, in order to make sure that every image editor and other program will recognize the file for what it is, you need to remove the “e” from the file extension.

Though .jpeg is a perfectly valid extension for an image file, it is both extremely rare and not universally recognized. For one, many people have never seen a .jpeg file and might think it’s a virus. Two, many applications only open files with a three-letter extension. Three, I, after years of being on the Web, can count the number of .jpeg files I’ve run across on my fingers.

There is no reason, no reason at all, that the file could not have just been .jpg. It would have avoided confusion, ensured compatibility and even saved a byte in transmission.

And I’m not even commenting on the insane naming conventions for the zip and image files (Zip files are sprintpictures_longnumber.zip and images are longnumber_ORIG.jpeg). However, I could probably write an entire post about that alone.

This whole process is stupid and, at every turn, it finds new ways to reach for the sky in the black art of facepalming. The very people who say they are trying to make our lives easier have devised a system that, along every step, finds new ways to make it harder.

Thank you Sprint. Thank you.

How it Should Have Worked

This post should have gone something like this:

1. Email picture to friend
2. Friend gets image as attachment
3. Friend goes “awww” at the cute dog

But no, that wasn’t what Sprint went for. I have no idea how other companies do it (feel free to send me picture email to jonathan at plagiarismtoday.com, I’ll happily review your carrier) but it is hard for me to imagine a more inefficient system.

Imagine, for a second, rather than sending this image to my tech-savvy, though rural, friend I sent it to my grandmother. How is she going to cope with this? She needs reminders to update her antivirus. She’s not going to be able to jump through more hoops than a circus tiger without some serious coaching.

This solution took six steps, six steps, to achieve what could have been done in one. The worst part of all, the elegant solution is the easiest. You send an image, it gets sent as an attachment. It would have taken moments to set up for Sprint.

Granted, Sprint’s setup seems to be geared for those who send multiple images, but even that fails. A) I’d wager most people send one image at a time and B) You could still zip up multiple images, so long as the total size was under a megabyte or two.

If you’re worried about attachments bouncing, I understand. So how’s this for an alternative, just email a link to a direct download, exactly like what Yousendit does?

Some very smart people solved the problem of sending large files on the Web years ago. It literally took Sprint hours and hours of work to find a way to screw it up all over again.

Great job Sprint, you just set the Internet back about five years.

Conclusions

I have a theory. The reason most companies fail is not because of market shifts, lousy marketing or even bad mortgages, but rather, because they do stupid things.

Sociology has shown us that when people try to work together a cloud of collective stupidity forms known as “Group Think”. This also explains Congress.

This stupidity causes a large group of intelligent human beings to believe something that even a newborn monkey would see through. This, my friends, stinks of group think.

There is no way a human being, without being under the influence of some kind of collective stupidity, could look at this system and call it the best available.

But if this is the best that Sprint can do, well, it is no wonder why they’re a sinking ship.

I wouldn’t have much business either if all I did was screw up simple tasks.