I had a strange confluence of events over the past couple days. In the mail, I have received a few notices about services that I can attach to my Fios connection at home. I don’t have interest in Fios TV now that Verizon dropped the ball and we went ahead with satellite instead, but the new 15/15 service is very attractive. I would love to be able to push as much data out as I pull down.
The same day that notice arrived in the mail, I got email on the Verizon billing account. Apparently, the credit card attached to that account is about to expire, and if I want the autopay to continue then I need to update the number via the site they provide. So I decided to update my billing info and see if there was a way to update my service to 15/15 at the same time.
I logged into the site, and to make a hideous story short: I couldn’t do it. I’d get as far as entering some information, and it would tell me that the tool (for payment, mind you) was unavailable. Also unavailable was my ability to read email through their web interface. What kind of ISP is so broken that they don’t let you pay or read email? Verizon, apparently.
Not really shocked by this, because that feature of their web site has never worked when I tried it, I moved on to looking on their web site for the billing phone number I could call when I can’t get their site to work. This number is not conveniently located on the “sorry, payment processing is down” page, nor any page that I could really find. The help pages I did find were really annoying, though.
On a few of the pages that were set up for “help”, the site told me that they didn’t support Vista (which is what this PC runs) or Windows 98, but that efforts were being made to keep up with the latest technology, blah blah blah. Why does my site need to run XP to view a web site? All I want is a phone number and a couple of simple questions answered. Lesser ISPs would put up a wiki, for Pete’s sake.
Alrighty, the web option was doomed, I went to the kitchen to retrieve the postcard with the 15/15 notice on it. Surely there was a phone number there, right? Yes. I called. Within moments, some guy answered and asked for my “Verizon phone number starting with area code”. I gave him my Vonage number, because I don’t have a Verizon number, just data. He asked what he could do for me.
I told him that I wanted information on the 15/15 service, whether it would require hardware changes or incite downtime, and how much more it actually cost than I was already paying because, as I said, I don’t actually have the Verizon phone service to obtain the bundle price in the flyer. I also wanted to sign up immediately - aka, pay Verizon more money - if his answers met with my approval.
That’s when he told me that his computer was down, so he couldn’t really do any of that stuff for me, and I was really left wondering why he bothered asking me how he could help when clearly he was impotent.
I got another email from Verizon today telling me that they’re going to cancel my online service if I continue to fail to operate their impossible site and customer service.
