an on-time payment customer for over 10 years and Sprint pcs still choose to ruin my credit

i use sprint as my cellular carrier. in june, 1998 i had decided to cancel and swithch to another company. i had a business and a personal account with sprint. i was assured by my local agent for sprint that all was paid and accounts closed. from that point i received no bills or statements from sprint until in jan of 1999 i received a statement from a collection agency demanding payment of approx. 347.oo that sprint claimed was outstanding. i immediately paid it to avoid future credit problems and was assured by the collection person that if i paid this right away my credit would be ok. i paid also with the idea that once i straightened the situation out with sprint i would be reimbursed. that, obviously did not turn out to be the case. after i finally got a sprint representative on the line, no amount of my explaining would have any influence on what the representative had as far as info in front of her as a record of my account. all she could say was "of course we sent you statements". it is just sad that i faithfully paid my bills every month and that because of a sprint customer service advocate "just doing her job" and following sprint procedures and showing no understanding for what actually happened, that i am out that amount and that my credit has that write-off against it