My Lengthy Rant Against Verizon

I don’t expect anybody to really read this. It’s just my petty effort to make a record of all the myriad frustrations I had with Verizon during the years I was a customer of theirs. It’s nothing important, except in the sense that it’s meant to discourage anyone from doing business with this horror of a company. That’s all I really need to say, here: Never give your money to Verizon. But if you’re skeptical and need good evidence against them, feel free to read my lengthy narrative diatribe. Presently, I will return to blogging about things that matter to more than just me.

I got new internet service hooked up yesterday after having been offline for several days. That put me behind with work, but I’m not nearly as bothered by that as I am about having permanently lost my office telephone number. The silver lining in both of those setbacks is that I will never again have to deal with the Verizon company. I would sooner run lengths of fishing line to coffee cans in the homes and offices of the people with whom I have to communicate than I would ever trust Verizon to provide me with any type of service.

There is a bit of history behind the reason for the severed internet and telephone connections. When I moved into the home out of which I currently work, I was living with an ex-girlfriend. I had signed up for internet elsewhere, and when we wanted to move the DSL to the current address, she called to have phone service installed as well. Somehow, merging the two services into one caused my name to be wiped clean from Verizon’s records. So far as billing was concerned, my both services belonged exclusively to my cohabitant.

It remained that way after she left me to move in with a new man, and it remained that way as I continued paying the bill, with my name above the return address, for two entire years. Not long after she left, I called the company to try to update the account information, but as it turns out that is impossible to do. On one attempt, I was told that they could attempt contacting the former account holder at the number listed on the account. I wasn’t okay with Verizon calling my ex, and I didn’t even know if she would be reachable at that number or at whatever time I happened to be on the phone with the company. Deciding that I couldn’t make the update myself, I sent an e-mail to my ex at some point, asking her to take care of one of the loose ends she had left behind. She never saw fit to do anything about it until, with no occasion or warning, she e-mailed me to say that she would finally make the change.

In the meantime, I had frequent problems with the service that was not in my name. My internet service blinked out of existence for a week out of each of two months. Getting it fixed was a horrible struggle. First, it involved calling their automated telephone directory. When I was able to navigate through it, I was connected to call center representatives in South Asia, who sometimes identified themselves by names like Carl or Cindy while speaking through heavy, obfuscating accents.

These workers were apparently trained to follow a series of prompts without the option to bypass or modify them. Each time I lost internet service, I was made to reset the modem, no matter how many times I had done this on my own before calling. I was always interested in minimizing my exposure to their technical support, so I confirmed ahead of time that the problem was not on my end. Toward the end of tediously confirming this, they then ran a line test, controlled from India on lines that ran about three miles from my home.

This, however, was the process only if and when I got through on the phone. On one notable occasion, the recorded voice asked me over and over again to enter the phone number about which I was calling. Each time I did this, it reported hearing nothing, and the messages started to berate me about refusing to provide needed information. On several occasions I got past that first step and followed the prompts all the way to the point where it told me to press 4 for high speed internet tech support or 5 for dial-up internet tech support, at which point I pressed 4 and was connected with dial-up internet tech support. This happened without fail over the course of about half a dozen consecutive calls, proving that it was far more than a momentary glitch.

It’s problems like that that make me wonder whether Verizon is aware of the fact that it is a telecommunications company. If the proper maintenance of phone lines is the entirety of its business, and it can’t even handle the structure of its own internal communications, or even respond to problems with that structure in a timely fashion, it has no business providing such a service outside the walls of its own offices. Let me be an analogy. I am a writer and editor. If I was incapable of e-mailing my clients without multiple misspellings and grammatically vague run-on sentences, it would be crazy of me to think that I could help other people develop their communications. If that was the case, it would be time for me to find a new line of work.

But despite all of this, I stuck with Verizon mostly because my service wasn’t in my name, I had put my home number on all of my business cards, and I wouldn’t have been able to keep that number if I had changed service. Also, the price was reasonable if I pretended that there was never noise on my phone line and that I was receiving consistent internet speeds. I wasn’t, though.

After one technician’s visit restored my connection, I found that my speeds were literally less than one-tenth of what I was supposed to be receiving on DSL. That began a new series of struggles to get a customer service issue resolved. One Verizon operator to whom I spoke actually downplayed the problem of waiting for simple web pages to load on a DSL connection by telling me that the speeds associated with my service were quoted as being “up to one Meg,” and that that maximum wasn’t guaranteed. She did not, however, agree that by that same logic I could agree to pay the company “up to eighty-five dollars” for internet and phone, and then pay whatever the hell I wanted.

When I was finally returned to reasonable – though not at all good – service, it was immediately time for a new conflict over billing. Verizon offered me no reduction whatsoever to my bill on its own accord. They did, however, agree fairly readily to a discount of ten dollars, in exchange for having been without service for two weeks, having had drastically reduced service for another week or two, and for overall inconvenience. Because I’m unreasonable, I didn’t think that was good enough, and I committed three hours to arguing with various operators before they discounted my outstanding bill by twenty-five percent. It required waiting until I was connected to that one Verizon operator in twenty who knows the definition of the phrase “customer service.”

Make no mistake, there are some good employees at the company. Visits from their technicians are generally quite pleasant, in no small measure because they freely admit that they work for a terrible, terrible company. One of them pointed out that if he has a full schedule of repairs to do in a day and an order for new service comes in, he is always told to do the installation first. It is seemingly no secret that Verizon, which has local media plastered with advertisements but never improves its local infrastructure, is committed to getting customers in the door, but has not an ounce of care as to whether it provides decent service once a person is on the hook. That is not just a former customer’s assessment, but an employee’s. I know other technicians have reported that they won’t sign up for their own company’s service, opting to have a spouse sign up for a competitor under her name, instead. Having a different name on the bill might be a problem if they were Verizon customers, though.

The only problems I’ve had with technicians were really problems with their dispatchers. When I was trying to get my service speed raised above 0.1 Megabits, the technician simply never arrived. No one called to make a new appointment, and as near as I could tell, the company had decided to ignore my problem and hope it went away. It took another trip through the labyrinthine phone system to get someone to acknowledge the missed appointment.

The operator got in touch with the technician and said that he claimed I never answered his phone call. But I was home the entire day, and my phone never rang. So that couldn’t be true unless they were referring to my cell phone, but I can’t figure out why they would call my secondary contact number if I was meeting the man at my home. And if his primary attempt to contact me via my secondary number failed, why would he not secondarily attempt to contact me on my primary number? Do Verizon employees just not trust Verizon telephone lines, and avoid them at all costs?

This is another point at which I think it bears repeating that Verizon is a telecommunications company. What hope could there be for providing a customer with that service if they can’t even be trusted to contact a customer through it? It couldn’t be simpler: If Verizon doesn’t know how to use phones it can’t possibly provide service for them.

The other issue that I had with a tech visit was when I sat on the phone scheduling an appointment for later in the day while I was looking at a Verizon technician out my window. That fellow had somehow managed to cut my phone line at the source while he was doing some work on the school across the street from me. I noticed that my internet went out, and then saw the Verizon truck parked on my street and the man in a hard hat standing on a ladder. I picked up my phone and confirmed that there was no dial tone, and then watched the truck pull away before I could run outside and kindly ask the driver to reconnect my service.

So I called Verizon’s technical support line and explained the situation. After asking me to check all of my phone’s connections, they let me know that they’d get somebody out there to look at it a few hours later. In the meantime, the first technician drove back onto my street, and because I was still naïve, I figured the company had done the right thing and sent him back to immediately fix the problem he’d caused. Instead, he went back to work on the school. I walked outside to speak to him and see if he realized what he had done. He had not. I asked him if he could plug my service back in while he had his ladder out. He informed me that he could not, as it wasn’t on his schedule of repairs. Another technician came out later that afternoon. I still wonder how much ground there was between his previous appointment and my home, but I’ll bet it was more than two hundred yards.

Maybe it was because it was silently agreed that my service could be cut off without warning, at any time, for no reason that I sometimes received sales calls at my residence from Verizon while I was a Verizon customer. This would come from India and they would inform me that the representative could sign me up for phone, internet, and television service. I would tell them that I already had two of these through Verizon and didn’t need the third. They would then say, “Oh, you’re a Verizon FIOS customer?” And I would have to tell these people – these people who worked at Verizon – that no, I was not a FIOS customer, because I had long ago been informed that FIOS was not available in my area.

The first of these sales representatives responded, “Oh, it’s probably available. Verizon works hard to get the new networks installed in all of its service areas.” He then asked me to hold the line, which I did despite the fact that I knew he was talking bullshit, because other former Verizon customers had told me that when the company told them that the new infrastructure wasn’t available in their area, they added that the customer could sign up for it anyway, and once they had enough subscriptions in the neighborhood, they would actually install it.

A minute after putting me on hold, the first sales representative came back to the line sounding crestfallen and said, “We don’t have it. Sorry.” It’s probably not a good sign when one’s customers know more about his operations than his employees do. As a telecommunications company, you’d really think that Verizon would be able to manage its call directories. If it’s to be regarded as an expert in communicating information, it damn well better be capable of keeping abreast of internal changes as to who is and isn’t a customer, or who is and isn’t accessible to some of its services.

Another sales representative who called me with the exact same offer put me on hold for the same reason, and rather than sheepishly acknowledging that I knew what I was talking about, she disconnected the call. Or maybe the call was just disconnected. It happened to me when I was fighting to get back my phone number just the other day. I managed to reach one of the rare helpful employees, and when I explained why I had lost the number after my ex saw fit to finally disconnect service, she asked “Well why don’t we just put your name on the old account?”

I was stunned, because I’d been told many times over the course of two years that that could not be done, and my ex had been told the same thing before she went ahead and had me cut off altogether. This particular operator asked me for a contact number for my ex, and then put me on hold while she tried to call her. After a moment, the line went silent and was disconnected. Dropped customer service calls are hardly the hallmark of a good telecommunications company.

My chances of reaching the same operator again were slim to begin with, but dropped to nil when the automated directory gave me a different set of options from what it had given ten minutes earlier. The next operator was rather less helpful. Amazingly, she agreed that a change could be made, but she insisted that the only way she could do it was to try to reach the contact number that they had on file for the person whose name was on the account. I figured that would be fine if the number was correct, so I asked what it was. She said she couldn’t give me that information. I told her what the current contact number was and asked her if the one she had matched it. She said she couldn’t give me that information. I asked her what she would do if the number was wrong. She said nothing.

It bears repeating just one more time: Verizon is a freaking telecommunications company. Also, it’s the twenty-first century. We have home phones and phones that we carry around with us, physical mail and electronic mail, SMS text messaging, call waiting, voicemail. Surely in this environment a telecommunications company can come up with more than one method for trying to confirm information between two parties. It would have been a simple thing for me to call my ex and ask her to call Verizon to release my number. Or they could have checked her IP address via e-mail to confirm that she doesn’t live in my area anymore and doesn’t need a local number, and thus Verizon could elect not to hold the number for her for eighty days. But as it is, they can’t elect not to do anything, because the computers are in charge and policies can’t be overridden in favor of common sense.

I called one more time, and received an operator who offered yet a different set of information. Though she thought that adding my name might have been possible before my ex cancelled the service, she insisted that it absolutely could not be done now. Despite being unhelpful, she strove to sound sympathetic, repeating that she understood my frustrations. So I trust she understood my decision to never come near her company again.

My contact number is gone, turning my current business cards into unique bookmarks, but at least I’m free of the egregious service that Verizon had subjected me to. I’ve got internet through Time Warner now, and it is already infinitely better. I’m a little afraid I’ll never have a problem and thus never be able to compare their customer service. I’ll probably get my new office phone number through the Magic Jack. I don’t know what to expect from it, but Verizon has set the bar for my satisfaction very low.

So in case it hasn’t be said clearly enough with the preceding 2,900 words: Stay the hell away from Verizon!

The Meaning of Boxing Day

Yesterday was Boxing Day. Virtually no Americans know the meaning or origin of that holiday, but it is so strongly associated with returning Christmas gifts that many people actually assume that it refers to placing merchandise back into boxes and taking them back to the stores. Worse still, retailers seem to be playing on that association so actively that in coming years I won’t be surprised if Boxing Day is actually recognized throughout the United States as the gift return holiday.

To my knowledge, Kohls was the worst offender, having scheduled a 5 AM opening for December 26^th. Other big box stores weren’t far off with their early openings and special promotions. There is a nascent trend towards turning the day after Christmas into a new Black Friday. All of the commentary I’ve already written here about how consumerism detracts from the enjoyment of non-shopping traditions applies tenfold to Christmas over how it applied to Thanksgiving.

My heart goes out to anyone who typically celebrates Christmas but has to work on that day. So it made me sad to see that each of the Wilson Farms stores and Tim Horton’s in my area were open throughout the holiday, and were awfully well-populated. It’s an unsympathetic employer who makes his employees work on what is supposed to be a cultural holiday on which most Americans gather together, relax, and celebrate the closing year. Even if they come from a distinct culture, I think at least that one day of rest ought to be a near-universal perk of working in America.

Added to the number of people who had to actually push coins across a retail counter on Christmas Day, I’m certain that early-morning promotions as major stores meant that overnight crews were required to setup that night, which presumably shortened of otherwise impeded some people’s gatherings with their friends and families. As consumers, making a shopping holiday of Boxing Day does a disservice to others who had, or would have, celebrated Christmas the day before.

But my concern is really for everyone, whether the new consumerist push obligated them to sacrifice a bit of Christmas or not. I find it appalling that returning gifts after Christmas is now assumed to be part of the holiday season. Personally, I’ve never unwrapped a package, looked at its contents, and thought to myself, “Gee, I can’t wait to returning this for something of roughly equal value that I actual like!” I’ve never said, “I hope you kept the receipt.” Generally, when I receive a Christmas gift, I say thank you, and I mean it, and if it’s an article of clothing that doesn’t fit, I or the giver exchange it for the same item in the proper size. That’s why the things that we open on Christmas morning are gifts: We didn’t choose them for ourselves; we don’t cherry-pick them; they represent not just our own base desires, but a material expression of how our loved-ones perceive us.

And even if our self-perception and the perception of others don’t align, accepting a gift is a great way to discover new things, and to learn to enjoy what you might not have chosen for yourself. This year, my mother gave me a very generous gift and before I opened it she commented that I might not think I need it. And indeed I don’t. I’m still young enough and fortuitous enough to stand the cold of my apartment without need of an electric heater. My mother intimated that I could take it back if I tried it and found that it didn’t suit me, but I made it clear to her that I would not be doing that, and I acknowledged that it was something I never would have purchased for myself, but that I would use now that I owned it. And despite not being something I’d coveted, it does suit me on some level, as the fake-fire display adds to the aesthetic of my home, and after all, I do need heat, even if I don’t acknowledge it to myself.

The price of the item might have done me better directed elsewhere, or even just kept by my mother, who is financially little better off than I am. But what ever happened to the old cliché, “It’s the thought that counts”? Perhaps we retain that sentiment as an ethic for the giver, but we don’t seem to ever apply it to the receiver. The thought behind each gift has value beyond money, and returning the item is often as good as returning the thought, sending the message, “You thought wrong.”

This is one of those instances in which the etiquette that we learned as children is thrown out the window as we age. Aren’t kids expected to say thank you even to the gifts that they don’t like? Then don’t their parents explain that they need only wear the ugly sweater when the aunt who gave it comes around next year? Are things like that social obligations that we just grow out of over time? Or do we just conveniently forget them after years of building up our material desires?

The four, six, eight and more weeks before Christmas are devoted to mutually gratifying those desires. With Boxing Day now devoted to consumption as well, how many more days need to be added to this shopping spree before the American affection for consumerism reaches a breaking point and starts to cede ground back to the spirit of giving, gratitude, and togetherness?

Santa Claus is Coming to... Wait, He's Here?

As I have a friend who has a modicum of disposable income and I’m sometimes able to afford bus fare, the time I spend with her allows me to go places I would not go on my own, like shopping malls. Of course, I don’t much care for the places, but I’ll take anything that’s outside the realm of my day-to-day experience. Poverty aside, I’m quite an anti-consumerist person, so I wouldn’t buy much even if I could, and I recoil at the insane ravenousness with which some people shop. I actually enjoy going to the mall for the sake of watching the passersby and speculating about their lives, exploring the cultural trends and modern fashions on display in storefronts, and generally observing everything at one step removed. But from time to time, some absurdly over-zealous advertisement or sudden mad dash of customers will tear me violently away from my enjoyment of the scenery and leave me burning with aggravation at the worst of my culture.

It’s the way that corporations and ad agencies and salesmen push us in certain directions, and it’s the way we happily and thoughtlessly run straight in the direction we’re being pushed. Nothing provides a more lasting impression of that than the way in which consumerism manipulates the very passage of the seasons. The calendar seems to run a little differently each year, though the change is unidirectional. And as obvious and discomforting as it is to me, I see no means of stopping it. Indeed, I see no one expressing interest in it stopping.

I went to the local area’s largest mall with my friend over the weekend. I’d hoped that I’d be able to lose myself in the crowd for a while and generally forget about the nature of the place, but about twenty feet from the door, I realized that there was no escaping the consequences of my stubborn non-conformity. For it was about twenty feet from the door that I saw Santa. A little further in, I could make out the Christmas music being piped across the mall concourse, and I tried to override Paul McCartney’s voice, changing the words to “simply having a wonderful nineteenth of November.”

I take it for granted that people are expected to start their Christmas shopping earlier each year, and that they tend to act in accordance with that expectation. It frustrates me to no end, but I take it for granted. When I worked in a wholesale club a few years ago, I was dismayed to see that our Christmas displays went up on September 17^th. This year, I saw autumn displays in a Rite-Aid in early August, and jokingly asked the employee working in that aisle how long it would be before all of that was cleared out to make way for the Christmas merchandise. He replied, “Actually, we got our first shipment this week.”

After Halloween was over, I was in a store that mostly sells seasonal merchandise and I saw that Christmas immediately sprang into full commercial blossom when October ended. I recall commenting that it now seems that from the point of view of retailers, Halloween ends in September and Thanksgiving simply doesn’t happen. How right I was, based on this weekend. And how unfortunate that the stores set the tone for everyone else. Two radio stations in my area began playing Christmas music 24/7 at the end of the first week of November.

I don’t like the emphasis on consumerism attached to all of our traditions. I make no secret of that. But what bugs me on a deeper level is way that this rampant commercialization of everything increasingly threatens to rob people of the actual experience of holidays and distinct seasons. I sometimes imagine that we’re spiraling towards a future in which citizens are constantly preparing for one upcoming holiday or another, but never pause to actually celebrate or enjoy any particular event. Perhaps someday the question “When is Christmas Day?” will be met with a quizzical look and the bemused response, “What are you talking about? Christmas goes from now until Valentines.”

The way I remember it, wasn’t the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade always the first appearance of Santa Claus? Weren’t we all supposed to have a collective feeling of warmth at that moment, knowing that the Christmas season began that moment? Even as a child and even living in the suburbs, I had a certain understanding that Thanksgiving marked the turning point at the end of harvest time, when the enjoyment of winter began. Because the parade was televised, all the children in America were able to enjoy the first glimpse of Santa together, and no one was able to lay first claim to the magic of the Christmas season the way they are able to lay first claim to a Blu-Ray player or laptop on Black Friday.

The only reason I can see for why a parent would take a child to see Santa Claus at a mall in the middle of November is out of a sense of opportunism. “Come on, Sally,” I imagine some young mom saying between gulping swills of coffee while holding out her watch, “let’s go see Santa now so we can beat the lines. This way he’ll know exactly what he needs to get when the stores open at eleven o’clock on Thanksgiving. So let’s go plop you on the man’s lap and get this shit over with.”

I think it’s awfully hard for adults to remember that the same things can be seen much differently through the eyes of children. Whereas standing in a line to declare your desires to a bearded fat man in a red suit may seem hellishly monotonous to many parents, for many children, though they may not be aware of it at the time, the prospect of having to wait with other children in order to talk to Santa makes the satisfaction of reaching him all that much more thrilling. And it’s a community experience, subtly reminding both parents and children that every reasonably fortunate family in the country will be getting much of what they want come December 25^th, and that it’s not just a private, one-household glut of loving avarice.

I guess what I’m saying is if we have to define our traditions by orgiastic consumption, can we at least do it in a way that encourages us to recognize that we’re part of a shared society? But make no mistake, I’d rather we tone the consumerism way, way down. I know that it’s unreasonable to expect our consumerist impulses to be overturned. I know that well enough to be okay with hanging out at malls. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect us to show capability for valuing something other than consumerism, as well.

Making our purchases and listing our material expectations in a more structured way may give us a chance at integrating the remnants of a few other traditions or experiences into our shopping. But no matter how we go about it, the more we shop, the less attention we’ll pay to the other elements of each season. Amidst the increasing primacy of money, it seems to me that the first thing we stand to lose is the seasonal benchmark of Thanksgiving. And with consumption as the defining characteristic of every celebration that surrounds it, it seems to me that a holiday of gratitude and remembrance is what we can least afford to lose.