PC Magazine's Sascha Segan has a hilarious post today at Gearlog, reporting on one of the magazine's editors' attempt to buy Cingular's new Samsung Sync music phone.

"To make a long story short, Cingular's telephone sales department told him he wasn't allowed to buy the phone, as he was migrating over from an old AT&T Wireless account," Segan writes. "However, they'd be happy to cancel his account, get rid of his phone number, open him an entirely new Cingular account with a new number, and sell him the phone."

Considering that Cingular has been charging old AT&T Wireless customers $5 a month for using old phones while at the same time offering them terrible services, Segan suggests that actually wasn't too surprising.

"But a quick call to Cingular higher-ups dispelled that theory: they said that our editor absolutely should have been able to buy the phone, and suggested that our editor should have demanded to speak to the salesperson's manager," Segan writes.

So it's the customer's responsibility to determine when the salesperson is screwing him over?

A post at HowardForums has the answer: salespeople get a bigger commission for starting a new account. "So the salesperson was looking out for his wallet, not for his customers (or Cingular's business)," Segan writes.