Verizon is good! For years they have been a PITA. I have been slammed and overcharged several times. Last year I was slammed once more and was presented with a long distance bill of $1200. They debit my bank directly (bad idea) so I called them to say I refused to pay the overcharge. The woman said it was too late to stop the chrge but shee was issuing a refund… next thing I know the charge never went through but the refund did so I find myself $1200 richer. So I call to tell them they have deposited that money and they can take it. The lady says “No we didn’t” and is adamant… hmmm, ok, I’m not going to fight over this… It is now six months later and I still have the money. I am not complaining.
I just wanted to chime in here with a (possible) caution against doing this. A credit rep who was helping me out a while back told me that once you do this and the company has “oral acess” to your accounts, they can withdraw $$ directly if you would ever have a dispute. This doesn’t apply to credit cards, or checks by mail, only debit cards or tele-checks. I don’t know if this is true for certain; but I had no reason to doubt the guy and I’ve been a little paranoid about it ever since.
bella
Funny, I’ve had Sprint for almost a year now and have never had any problems with them. I have the bill charged to my credit card, and the closest thing I’ve had to a problem was when one month, I was too close to my credit limit and the payment was rejected. They kept calling me on my cell phone during the day, which kind of annoyed me because they were burning my minutes, but once that got straightened out, it was smooth sailing.
From what I’ve heard from other people, there doesn’t seem to be any cell provider that is consistently good. I’ve heard both bad things and good things about every company, so it’s kind of a crapshoot.
We’re with AT&T. Neither of us has ever had a problem, and the service & customer service are both great. My previous provider (Worldcom/MCI/Alltel) sucked big wind from a customer service perspective.
I second the vote for AT&T (Wireless only).
Had their Digital One-Rate service since about day2 it was offered (almost 4 years now) and it’s been really quite good - good coverage, reasonable plans, can almost always get a Customer Service human, can change my plan/# of minutes every month if I want. And when they do cut off my service (regularly, but it’s my fault because I travel a lot at times and don’t pay my bills on time all the time :rolleyes: ) it’s a quick phone call with my credit card and service is restored in about 10 minutes.
Really, after everything I’ve heard, I think they do a (relatively) good job.
Hm. I’ll take all this into consideration.
Would you believe, they called again?! This evening! After Mr. Rilch talked to them yesterday! “I know you’re not calling about this phantom debt again,” he said. And so on. Apparently the phone monkey then said “Oh, I see it’s been taken care of!” :wally:
Yesterday, they agreed to take off the $3 service charge for talking to a live person. Let’s see if that happens.
Heh. Another vote against Verizon: they couldn’t keep out bill straight to save their lives. Every single month they screwed up the billing, every single month they gave us a run-around, every single month they promised that they fixed it, and to top it off the voice mail system for the phones never worked right. (Three DAYS to get a voice mail? GAH!)
We sucessfully ended our contract with them without paying any kind of penalty, because we raised a ruckus about how it was THEM who were failing to uphold their end of the deal, and reported them to the BBB. 
Currently, we’re with Sprint and so far knocking on wood we’re not having problems. Possibly it’s because we got it through a corportate account, and they don’t want to piss off a bunch of clients at once.
<< Dum-de-dum-dum… >>
Mrs. Chef and I have our cell-phone service through Cingular, and they have been GREAT. When our house was broken into last November and our phones were stolen, I called them and they swung into action, temporarily shutting off service until we got new phones, asking if we had old phones lying around and did we want to have them activated, and even bending the rules a bit on whether we qualified for phone upgrades (the upshot of which was that in exchange for extending our contract another year - which we would have done anyway - we got shiny new phones with more features for free!). When the next bill came and it was clear that the thief had used the phones before they were shut off, they removed those calls immediately (thus preventing us from going over the number of minutes on our plan).
The one other time we had a dispute on our bill, they promptly and courteously fixed it.
If I have ANY quibbles about Cingular, they are: they let any Tom, Dick and Harry resell their service, so many of the stores with a Cingular awning out front cannot be found in the phone book under “Cingular.” This can make trying to reach a particular store a frustrating experience if you don’t know the number beforehand.
Also (and I don’t know if this is true of all wireless phone companies or what), on their bills, incoming calls don’t have the originating number listed, and they claim to be unable to tell you what said number might be. I can’t understand how this can be so… there MUST be a record of that. It can make it impossible to verify whether a particular call is bogus or not.
And if those are the only things I can think of to say against them, they’re doing amazingly well compared to the companies everyone’s been (justifiably) bitching about in here.
Go Cingular!
just checking…
The insurance company never did send the FAX, as promised, but I did finally receive a confirmation of payment in the mail. So I guess it’s settled but the whole thing was one major %^& pain!
Well, that’s good, at least.
This might be a slight hijack, but it seems to me that most prepaid wireless plans would obliviate this problem. Yes, they are gonna cost more per minute. But I suppose it depends how much your time dealing with billing plans, operators, clueless fucks, &tc is worth to you…
I’m using a Sprint PCS phone now, prepaid. If you’re the sort that spends all day talking on it, you’ll pay a LOT more. If you just use the phone for those times you when you might really NEED it, it’s more like $10-$20 a month…
This might be a slight hijack, but it seems to me that most prepaid wireless plans would obliviate this problem. Yes, they are gonna cost more per minute. But I suppose it depends how much your time dealing with billing plans, operators, clueless fucks, &tc is worth to you…
I’m using a Sprint PCS phone now, prepaid. If you’re the sort that spends all day talking on it, you’ll pay a LOT more. If you just use the phone for those times you when you might really NEED it, it’s more like $10-$20 a month…
Oops, sorry…