Is $130 a lot to pay for local phone service?
Verizon is doing their job to set us all back. Every once in a while Darth Vader comes on the radio to assure as that only the name has changed, everything else is still the same. Well that's true insofar as they're still doing whatever it takes to screw over customers, of course. Their latest foray has been instituting pay-per-minute billing, just like the telcos in the former Czechoslovakia. It sure feels good to see we're becoming more like third world countries every day. Of course, I discovered this the hard way. Thanks, Darth Vader!
I worked in Ocean City for a few months and rented an apartment from a realtor. I specified that I wanted a place with a phone line so I could use dialup, but of course this information never made it to the owner of the condo I was renting. I was paying a flat $30 for the phone service (which was still in the name of the owner), which is enough to cover the full service fees. Of course, I figure that the condo being a summer residence, they only subscribe to the crippled Verizon service, so I was prepared to just dial up and leave the connection running all day like I did in college. Back then (a year ago :P ) the crippled service was 10 cents per call, so there wasn't any penalty as long as you just make one call per day. (I didn't need the phone for anything else because I had invested in a Voicestream mobile phone, which has been great, btw.)
Of course, it turns out that they subscribed to the per-minute crippled service, so a month later I get a call from them saying I have in excess of 10,000 minutes of calls, which at 3 cents per first minute + 1 cent per additional minute minus whatever the standard monthly fee gives you, comes out to a phone bill of about $130 in local calls (crappy local calls at that, since the service often got cut off, sometimes as much as once every 10 minutes... it's hard enough as it is to download stuff over a slow modem connection). Well that's just great, so much for trying to save money.
Both the owner and I spend entertaining hours on the phone with Verizon customer service trying to negotiate some kind of refund. After all, shouldn't there be some cap on local service? You should only be able to overshoot the calling fees of the $25/month full service plan by so much. But almost 5 times? That's highway robbery. But customer service is steadfast on keeping their hard-extorted dough. As hard as I've tried to keep my money out of Verizon's paws, I've lost, they've gotten it anyway. And I've tried... (I use bigzoo.com calling cards to avoid plunking in quarters at payphones, I have my nifty Voicestream GSM service, etc.)
So how am I going to justify that extra $100 in "local calls" on my expense spreadsheet? I'm normally a very patient, mild-mannered person. But those calls to customer service have really brought out the worst in me... I've never taken the opportunity to swear and take out my stress and aggression on random strangers before. Of course it's not the customer service rep's fault for anything, he's just a cog in the big ugly machine. But they're paying him to let me explore the vulgar side of my personality. It's vaguely therapeutic.
So I've created a new category in my personal expenses labelled "prostitution" and payed to "Verizon Communications". Whenever I feel my pent-up anger rising and have the need to take out my aggressions on a fellow human, I dial up Verizon's toll-free line (preferably from a Verizon payphone) and have a little phone sex anal rape with a Verizon-employed CSR professional (of course I politely explain to the CSR that I have mean no offense to him personally and am just venting to the company in general through hime beforehand, but that's just me). I figure eventually I'll even get my $100 worth, too.
Need a little outlet for vulgar indulgence too? Let Verizon bring out the worst in you... find your nearest 800 customer service number at the Verizon phone support page.
You might also be interested in the Verizontotallysucks.com community.
Rowin has been ... well, disenchanted ... with Verizon ever since they were still Bell Atlantic / Nynex / whatever depending on the geographic region he was living in. Until recently he'd been content to just excercise his basic consumer right to take his business elsewhere (as difficult as that is given their monopoly position). But these among other events have pushed him over the edge, and he has not dedicated some of his leisure time to helping inform his fellow consumers of the danger and exploitation they face at the hands of this corporation