I need an outlet, and I thought the "other" forum at NTCompatible would be a fitting place..
 
How else to describe my rage towards Verizon other than to say they are without competition, the most unorganized, poorly-managed, incompetent, selfish, deceiving, and careless company I’ve ever dealt with.
 
Where to begin…?
 
Let’s start with the spread of the infection two years ago. During the summer of 2000, Verizon slimed its way into the Northeast, taking over Bell Atlantic (I miss you guys!!). During that summer I was a waiter at a resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Being only a summer job while away from school, I lived at the resort in one of the hotel rooms reserved for employees who shared similar circumstance (yes, it was sweet).
 
Being a die-hard computer junkie, I wanted to be online.. even if it WAS through dial-up. I did not need to subscribe to an ISP because there was a satellite campus of my college (Penn State) near where I was staying… which provided any students in the area with dial-up access. The only problem was that the campus might have been a long distance call away. To check on this, I called Verizon to ask if calls to that campus would be considered long distance. They ran some sort of test or looked at a map, got back on the phone with me and told me “no”…. the call would not be long distance.
 
Very happy with this, I immediately dialed-up, and stayed dialed-up for the entire summer. At the end of July I received my first phone bill, $1,827.xx. Since the bills come one month “behind”, I got an even more gut wrenching feeling, knowing about an impending $700 bill to arrive in August. How does a 21 year old college student who lives off of ~ $2,000 per year react to this sort of shock? First I laughed. Then I got scared. Then I wanted to throw up. Then I wanted to just cry. Those bills would mean that I would work my butt off all summer long, and still not have enough money to pay off an outstanding phone bill… not to mention tuition for the upcoming year, food and other living expenses, car maintenance, and books. It turns out the call was not a “long distance” call but, rather, a “local long distance” call.. or a “toll call”.
 
As I often do when I encounter huge roadblocks like this, I first called my father for advice. After I got past all of his “I told ya so’s”, he suggested a few courses of action. The first, obviously, would be to call Verizon and try to negotiate a settlement through them. Well, if you remember, during the summer of 2000, Verizon employees were on strike. It took until summer’s end before I was able to reach a representative. Then, after a week of nagging and negotiating, they chopped off $900… a nice gesture, but still unacceptable. They would not budge any further, so I decided to take things up with the Public Utilities Commission (PUC).
 
The PUC heard my complaint, filed it, and sent it up the line to the head honcho-judge-type person there. During the phone call I was advised to not speak with any representative from Verizon and not to send any payments until a “verdict” had been reached. Also, I was instructed that if Verizon called, I was to refer them to the PUC with complaint (or issue) number. I did what the PUC told me to do, but by this time Verizon had forwarded my information and the “story” to a creditor. I was receiving calls almost daily from those jerks, and not being Verizon, they did not care about the PUC or the issue number. I then called Verizon (against the PUC’s recommendation) to inform them of the actions taken by me, with hopes that they would withdraw their troops until a notice was issued by the PUC. According to the representative at Verizon, when a problem of this sort thrown into the laps of the creditors, Verizon washes its hands. In other words, I was screwed. I had the creditors badgering me for payments, and the PUC telling me not to pay. Eventually I got the PUC to call the creditors and tell them to lay off… which worked for a while.
 
October rolled around and I got a letter in the mail from the PUC confirming my responsibility for the payment. Their argument was that since I did not have the name of the Verizon representative, their extension or direct contact information, or the time and day of the call, I had no way of proving my story. I then dropped my sword and gave in. I was defeated. I did all that I could do for the time being. Verizon won. The enormous corporate monopoly was successful in bleeding me of every last penny in my pocket. Fortunately by the time the “verdict” rolled around, I had an internship at General Electric and was able to pay off the debt with seven, $270 monthly payments. I was so poor during my senior year of college because of them. At one point, I had $15.83 to my name. That’s it.
 
I got through that mess, but it left an awful taste in my mouth. Nowadays, with every chance I get, I bad mouth the organization as much as possible and suggest to anybody that if they have a choice between Verizon and some other company… chose that other company.
 
Since then I’ve had other issues with Verizon, dealing with everything from billing, to DSL service that doesn’t work, to incorrect recording of my home address in nearly every one of their systems, to unexplained Verizon letters in the mail telling me that payments are overdue, to customer “service” representatives who know even less about customer service than the product they are supporting, to the representatives who can’t speak a coherent form of English, and finally, to the woman who asked me if my “Internet browser was working correctly”.
 
On a more positive note, the DSL repair service team does a wonderful, WONDERFUL, job to troubleshoot their problems and eventually (after two months) fix the problem. Turns out, to fix my problem, they did something I suggested they do 3 weeks ago… which was re-route my DSL to a different shelf, since the one I was currently connected to was running at 95% utilization. But hey… what do I know right? I’m just a stupid customer!
 
 
Well anyways… if you can avoid Verizon, do so.