Recently in Verizon Sucks Category

You can read the first two chapters in the saga here.

The seemingly neverending struggle with Verizon ended today in defeat. I have cancelled my internet service, despite having no alternative route for access.

But I had little choice.

I wrote the previous Verizon post on Monday before going to work, and forgot to post it.

Anyway, I have new news. This morning, Karen called me to tell me that the connection went down in our apartment. We were now without internet.

Once I got home, at about 10am, I called Verizon. The polite, though incompetent, yahoo I got on the phone ran me through his troubleshooting script for a good twenty minutes. He was clearly new on the job, perhaps even on his first week, because he kept thanking me for every piece of information I gave him, even thanking me whenever I told him that I had followed his latest instruction in the troubleshooting script. I held back the urge to say, "Sweetie, I'm a problem customer with special needs. Please put someone on who knows what they're doing." Bitch out a guy on his first week at a new job - it's like kicking a dog.

So, after what felt like hours waiting for him to finish reading his script, he called on actual technical support.

I have to call Verizon every two or three weeks due to connectivity issues. Sometimes my downstream rates, according to their own website, are closer to dialup than they are to the pitifully low speed I'm paying for (768kbits). Other times, I have no connection at all. Each time I have a problem like this, I have to call them three or four times because their woefully unqualified tech support staff insist that the problem is on my end. On the fourth call, I always manage to convince the representative to get a network technician on the phone who, whoops, finds out that something was wrong and fixes it. Until the next time...

Karen and I have had verizon DSL since February. Ironically, every time we move to a better neighborhood, our service worsens. In Bed-Stuy, we had OptimumOnline at the blistering speed of about 5mbits(!!) per second and I never once had connectivity issues. In Greenpoint, Time-Warner fed us a regular throughput of 3mbits(!) a second, and we had to call once when the wiring outside was shorting. Since we started Verizon DSL, we have downgraded from 1.5mbits to 768kbits at the suggestion of a network technician for the sake of "connection stability." We have called Verizon no fewer than fifteen times with problems on our connection. Now, the problem has spread.