Verizon. A big company, right? Corporate, efficient, full of technological resources. Or so one would hope.
One would be wrong.
Let me give you a completely hypothetical scenario: Imagine three roommates sharing a house. Verizon bill, for telephone and internet service, is in the name of one of them. Said roommate decides to move out. Does Verizon let him simply transfer the bill into another roommate's name? Oh, no no no...
Verizon's TOTALLY LOGICAL system is as follows:
1) Roommate #1 must cancel the account, paying something like an $80 termination fee
2) Roommate #2 must call Verizon to start a new account
3) Roommate #2 does this before the cancellation date, in hopes that service doesn't have to be disrupted. She is told that Verizon can't do anything until the previous account is actually terminated.
4) She calls back the day after the termination date. Verizon tells her that the account must actually "clear out of the system" (as if it were an outgoing tenant... except people don't get grace periods, only computerized sets of numbers do) before a new account can be entered for the same address.
5) Roommate #2 calls AGAIN a few days later, and spends 25 minutes on hold before she remembers that she has something better to do, like watch water boil.
6) Roommate #2 calls yet again, and speaks with Pleasant Customer Service Man who tries valiantly (it seems) to get her a better deal than the HIDEOUSLY OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE one that Verizon offers for high-speed internet without phone service.
7) Pleasant Customer Service Man pleasantly reactivates the account, and pleasantly reports that we will have internet access again on September 21st.
I called on September 11.
Except originally I called on August 31st.
This, my friends, is a F*@%ing bad system. Not only can they not just roll over the account, but I have to wait three weeks and pay significant extra money in order to get a service that I already had. But there are about four telecommunications companies in this country and the very few other options are no better.
Gotta love the U.S.A.
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3 comments:
ah! i had a similar situation. only with comcast. cable tv is covered by my landlord. internet is not. but of course when i called to try to get internet they said they'd have to take me off his cable bill and i'd have to pay for my own since there is already internet on the account and they can't add a second internet line at the same address. basically i had to call and talk to 5 different people before someone agreed to hook up my internet. which of course took 2 weeks. i just got my first bill, which of course, was due 3 days before i received it in the mail. shouldn't there be some agency that monitors this stuff?
America.... Fuck YEAH!
Actually, that's not really accurate, since Verizon probably has outsourced most of its help and IT... but then again, Americans are probably the ones at the top making the decsions.
Sprint is just as bad... but, the customer service reps seem to have a lot more personal power to over-ride company policies.
I find if I don't get what I want from a company on the first phone call, I say no thanks, and then call back and try a different customer service rep. It's amazing how company policies can change depending on who you're talking to (and which country they're in...)
I clicked on the comments so I could leave one that says, "I sure hope Comcast isn't like that."
Shit.
But the good news is, I'm the one moving, so I guess it's my roommates who will be screwed.
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