Verizon is the DEVIL!

Well, I know at least one of my loyal readers is looking at that title and thinking "Scott, didn't you learn that like 5 years ago?" And the answer is, of course, yes I did. For the rest of you, some background: When I moved into my first apartment after college, my roommate and I went with Verizon DSL for our internet. And it was great for most of the first year. In the winter of the next year, my original roommate moved out, and another of my old college roommates moved in. The DSL was in my old roommate's name, so we wanted to switch it to my new roommate. It took all of about a 2 hour phone ordeal to get Verizon to say they would do that, and in the end we actually had to tell a fib regarding what was actually happening in order to avoid having to send our equipment back in and them sending us the exact same equipment back. You might think that is why I think Verizon is evil, but you would be wrong.

A few weeks later, I came home to find that our internet was down, and that the modem was unable to connect. My roommate gets on the phone, spends the better part of the evening dealing with tech support, and can't find a solution. They say they are going to do some other things and if we don't have internet again in a day or two, we should call back. 2 days pass, no internet. Roommate calls back, turns out that they had screwed up the transition of the account, and our service had actually been deactivated,, and that it would take 3-5 days to get it back on. So, due to their screw up, we were without internet for the better of a week. Shortly after that, we were going to take the promotional rate and switch to Comcast for our internet, but when we called in to talk about cancelling our DSL, the hold message informed us that the price of our package was dropping by about 10 bucks a month, so we figured we'd tough it out. Of course, Verizion didn't mention (and they would swear up and down that it didn't actually happen) that our connection speeds would crap out as well. Regardless of what they say, I know what happened to our internet performance. So the next time the promotional offer came around for Comcast, we jumped on it. And it became standard practice for me to decry Verizon at any opportunity.

How did I wind up in another run in with them, you might ask. Fast forward to Winter 2007. I'm still loving my Comcast internet at the time, but have become convinced that Comcast TV is the devil. So I switch to satelitte. When I had Comcast TV, my internet was roughly the same price as comparable Verizon service, but when I dropped TV, my internet connection speed was lowered and the price jumped up about 20 bucks. (As an aside, how brilliant is that? A customer drops one of your services, so you make the service he still has crappier and more expensive.) I'm a principled person, but on the matter of internet service, my principles can only impact my wallet to a certain degree, so I bit the bullet and went back to Verizon.

Fast forward to yesterday. My internet service has been running great for a year now, and I was almost ready to forgive Verizon. Then, shortly after I get home from work, I lose the internet and the DSL modem isn't connecting. I happen to look out and see that there's a Verizon tech working 2 doors down, and that she has the main hub for the neighborhood open, so I figure, oh,no problem, she's doing something, it'll come back on when she's done. And a few minutes later, it did come on. No harm, no foul. Well, I walked away from the computer for a while, and when I came back, the internet was down again, and now the tech was gone. Wonderful.

So, I call Verizon and explain the situation, and of course, because they'll never take the word of a customer on something like this, and it's a regional call center so they don't actually know that someone was out working at the neighbor's, I had to go through all the stupid troubleshooting tests. Annoying, but no big deal. Then they turn me over to dispatch to schedule a tech to come out, and the woman at dispatch tells me that there will be someone out tomorrow (today) between 8 am and 7 pm and so there needs to be someone available at the house. Well, that rather set me off, because this house is obviously pretty empty during the work day. "So," I said, in a less than calm tone, "You're asking me to potentially sit around all day and give up a day's pay at my job while I wait for someone to come fix something that your tech broke?" I believe at some point in our discussion I presented the possibility of giving them a bill for my time lost at work. Anyhow, I finally got her to request a window between 1 and 5 pm, but she insisted up and down that it wasn't guaranteed. To which I asked, "I live like 10 minutes from my office, can they just call me when they leave their last job before mine." "We can't guarantee that." Ugh. The whole thing was especially aggravating because I was positive they weren't even going to need into the house to fix the problem.

Anyhow, to make a long story slightly less long, the tech who was out with the neighbors yesterday apparently had something to finish up with them this morning, and when she saw my ticket, she called me and asked if I could come right then, so I did. As I anticipated, the service was already up when I got back to the house (she had realized her mistake overnight) and the tech just had to stop by to confirm that it was working again. And of course, all of this could have been solved with much less hassle if Verizon had the infrastructure in place to actually let me talk to the local people in the first place. I don't even want to think about what part of the world the people who I was talking to last night were in.

So, here I am, happily back up on the internet again, once again fully aware of the evil that is Verizon. Unfortunately, my other options are all either every bit as evil, or way more expensive, so I'll just have to suck it up and move on. Looking at the bright side, the lack of internet did allow me to get almost 1/4 of the way into Last Dance, which I'm already loving. So I have that going for me, which is nice.