Day #114: The Cold War Kids – “Skip the Charades”
The Internet has been going down quite frequently at our house over the last few days. I had my suspicions that it has something to do with Verizon’s new push away from stand-alone DSL plans. Effective as of yesterday, new customers have to bundle DSL with other services, although existing customers were grandfathered in. They’d only have to bundle if they upgraded their service, or discontinued service, and resumed it again in the future. With the telecom behemoth hell bent on squeezing money from it’s customers at every turn, I was sure it was targeting the existing customers and slowing down their service in order to either encourage them to upgrade (and hence, requiring them to bundle) or leave Verizon altogether. I dread having to call Verizon’s customer service about the problem. On the one hand, I am put on hold for an eternity and then, when I finally do get human contact, I will be transferred to a representative at a call center in India who must have orders to stick to the script, no matter how ineffective it may be for addressing the problem. Ultimately, the user will be told they are the source of the problem. That it isn’t the company’s fault that the problem continues to occur. But, this couldn’t be written off as a mere user problem, as customers flooded the forums with identical complaints over the last few days. I posted one, too, and someone replied with a suggestion to contact the company instead via Twitter.
Twitter? Apparently, this was some kind of backdoor route to actual customer service that I (and many others) weren’t aware of. Though, I was skeptical at first, given all the pleasantries explained between Verizon and their FIOS customers via tweets. At this stage, I just wanted everything resolved so I didn’t have to continue the quest of penetrating the force field that is real, genuine corporate responsiveness. Especially given that we are but lowly subscribers of stand-alone DSL. A mere $30/month they get from us. But, I posted my complaint with my last bit of hope. And then… someone behind the Verizon Service Twitter curtain responded. After a few exchanges, I was told someone would call me about the problem (and I was still thinking… yeah right). But then, tonight! I got a call from an actual live person from somewhere in America who, in unscripted conversation, discussed the problem with me.
And I was like… Woah-M-G!
Four hours later and our DSL is still shit tonight, but I think I’ve moved enough mountains today. Actually resolving the issue is going to have to wait till tomorrow. Dweebcentric out.
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