Damnit, Verizon! (again!)

The BBQ Pit
1

Our phones spontaneously quit working.
Of course we would learn this on the day the plumber was supposed to call and set up what time he would be there, and since he couldn’t get through and he didn’t have our cell phone number (his boss had our cell phone number, but why that wasn’t communicated was a mystery) he was unable to reach us and we’ve had to push back the radiator installation another week which means I’ve been busting my ass to get the room painted for no apparent reason but at least I’ve got more time to paint now.

We are phone savvy in our household so we checked all the phones and lines, then checked the network interface box with a POTS (plain old telephone set). We can make outgoing calls, but nothing can come in. The dial tone comes and goes at random.

This morning my husband calls Verizon. We’ve had fun with Verizon before. The sort of fun that ended up in a complaint with the PUC.

Husband gets the automated system, then transfered to repairs, who imediately try to send him to a FiOS sales person. :rolleyes: He manages to refuse that transfer. Then the repairs person does their usual “It’s probably a problem with your phone, no? Then maybe you had power surge, how about unplugging all your phones, no? Oh! You know what the network interface box is! You got a dialtone there, it must be a problem with your inside lines. You can’t recieve calls there and the dialtone cuts out? Let me do a line check . . . Oh. Yes, I see there is a problem with our external lines.”

“I can send a repair person out some time between now and Monday.”
Monday? Monday?!?!
Oh, well, they’re very busy, you see. Yep, there’s no way they can narrow the time down any closer than four days.
GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

2

Verizon personnel are Satan’s minions. Our only option out in the country here is to have Verizon DSL. We wanted Warner Cable, but they want $1000 to run a trench to our house, so that’s not going to happen. My spousal unit works from home and a reliable high speed connection is vital.

When our service went down we started calling customer service, aka Demonspawn Central. There is apparently no way to inform anyone at Verizon that the cable connection is down. Instead, one is routed - eventually, very eventually. . . . - to tech support, whereupon one is put on hold for years and finally told that there is no outage reported and that one’s modem must be reconfigured. No matter how many times you call, this is what you are told. It is not true, but this is the only answer the Devil’s helpers are programmed to give.

If you ask for a supervisor you will be told there is no supervisor. If you challenge this (“So you own Verizon personally, do you?”) then you will be put on hold. A superivsor will finally - after 20 minutes or so - come on the line and tell you whatever it is you want to hear, usually that the problem will be fixed in 2 to 4 hours.

The problem is never fixed in that time, whereupon the whole demonic dance begins again. We had days of this, and then we started getting automated phone calls telling us our service was restored. It wasn’t, but there was no human to talk to. The deepest circle of Verizonhell was reached when I got a call from a human being to tell me I had no service!!! Honestly, there was no other point to the call.

I got busy online and finally came up with a name and address to write to. I wrote to this person at this address:

Ivan Seidenberg
Chief Executive Officer
Verizon Communications
140 West Street
New York, NY 10007

I didn’t expect anything, but after a week or so I got a call from Mr. Seidenberg’s “assistant.” He was very concerned, very polite, and gave me two months free service. That might sound great, but that’s about $80 and I wouldn’t have gone through this for $80. Still, if they get enough complaints they might do something.

Then a day later I got a call from a Verizon customer service rep. “I understand you’re having trouble surfing the net. . .” she began.

“SURFING THE NET???” I told her to stick it where the sun don’t shine and NEVER EVER call me again.

These people take customer service to new lows. Surely they will go out of business soon.

3

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?” :mad:

I want Verizon to go out of business just so I never have to see that smarmy little fuck and his “network” ever again. :mad:

4

Verizon will put itself out of business if it keeps going on this way. As for the “can you hear me” thing, it’s annoying but it’s a great thing to say loudly when someone is on a phone in public.

Has anyone done the “talking on cell phones while driiving/in public” thing yet? Why am I sure that’s been done? Tell me. I have lots to say about it.

5

I think all cable company customer service departments are located in Hell. We have Charter cable, and a few weeks ago when I tried to log on after work (1am) I discovered that we had no cable. I was sure we had no cable, because we use Vonage for phone service and it uses cable. I used my cell phone to call customer service, and then the dance with the devil began. First, I got a computer telling me to reset my modem. Uh, modem doesn’t need resetting - I don’t have cable! It took about 10 minutes of pressing various buttons to frustrate the computer enough to make it hand me over to a (?) human being. This demon also wanted to do the modem dance. It took at least 5 minutes to get him to pry himself from his script. When I finally got him to listen to me long enough to understand that I used Vonage for telephone service, he tried to sell me Charter telephone service.

I cracked up. When I got myself under control, I told him it probably wasn’t a good time to try to sell me additional services, considering that the services I was already paying for weren’t working! For some reason, this was able to boot him out of Hell, and he finally admitted the servers in my area were undergoing routine maintaince and would probably be down for about another hour.

I’m not hard to get along with. I understand that mantaince has to happen, and it makes logical sense to do it when the fewest customers will be trying to get online. But why couldn’t he have just said that in the first place!

6

“I understand that mantaince has to happen, and it makes logical sense to do it when the fewest customers will be trying to get online. But why couldn’t he have just said that in the first place!”

Exactly. At various times in our odyssey we were told the problem was “routine maintenance” or a “software issue,” or pretty much whatever the person we were talking to wanted to blame it on. We didn’t really care what THEIR issue was, we just wanted it fixed. The next time we’d call we’d have to go through the “reconfigure your modem” crapola again. Finally, we asked a supervisor (or someone pretending to be a supervisor, more like) to make a notation in large red letter on our account to the effect that our modem does not need to be reconfigured, that we actually do know something about computers and we know when our stuff is not the problem. She promised to do this but she didn’t. Imagine our surprise.

It’s obvious their customer service department should have a number recognition system such that when you call in you are given the appropriate recorded message telling you they are aware of an outage, approximately how long it will take to fix, etc. This would not only make sense from a customer’s point of view, but would mean a real live person would not have to waste time on the usual long line of crapola. I have no idea what they’re paying these people, but presumably they are paid something, you know?