Discussion:Can you hear me? Verizon?

I continued with Verizon until the second or third bill when I realized I was being eaten alive by local message units. I called to see if they had a flat rate and was told, "you are calling your ISP, we can tell that. There are no flat rates for that; we want you to get a DSL line." To put it nicely, I asked the lady if she were familiar with the term 'blackmail' and went off to sign up with AT&T after telling her if I ever put in high speed service, it would not be with Verizon.

Three years later, I use Comcast for cable modem and have been very happy. Despite 'we want you back' mailings, I am still with AT&T for my three phone lines. Today a client called and asked if my fax was working; I checked and found the line dead, checked outside at the box and found it dead there too. I called AT&T and reported this in a totally automated call. Fifteen minutes later they called back with a message that the problem was being turned over to another company and would be fixed by 2pm.

At noon, a Verizon truck pulled up. The man walked to the outside box, plugged his device in "9502" and told me it was working. I could hear a dial tone, but I noted that I had reported the outage on "9503." He plugged into that line and found it deader than McKinley, told me he was told the bad line was 9502 and that I had to call AT&T, put away his tools and drove off leaving the phone in the same state.

First I went inside and looked in my dictionary to see if Verizon was a synonym for 'rude.' Then I called AT&T, where after a bit, I talked to a human who said I had reported 9503 and had no idea why Verizon got it wrong. So now they must touch base again and probably this same a..hole will come out again and fix it.

And people wonder why I will not do business with Verizon.

As for Verizon, I totally agree with you and my best buddy from college is a big wig with them. I call and abuse him about it constantly.

From a practical standpoint, have you considered going to a VOIP business package. They can port your numbers for you. Vonage is pay one price and if you travel, you can bring your phone with you. There are also e-fax numbers that will allow you to receive faxes as PDF attachments. And you can send faxes directly from software programs such as Word or Excel. Scanners can be used to scan and fax when you need to.

no need to be tied down to the horrific Verizon bastages. Revolt, rise up and change.

I leave this office less than 15 days a year, and only to go to another office where I get calls on their phones or on cellphone....a road warrior I am not. Anyway, from some of the stories in our local business section about Vonage, which is not far from here, I have long range doubts.

Unfortunately I'm on Verizon too. I get more junk mail and phone calls from them than I do from the credit card companies. There big thing in the Tampa area is DSL. They keep saying it's better than cable. The difference is that when I got cable, a person came out to my office to install it and stayed there until it was working correctly. With Verizon's DSL, they ship you a box and then insist that the box works. The problem is that YOU are too stupid to know how to hook it up. I could vent for days about Verizon, but it's tax season and I'm busy.

The final straw was this weekend. A water main break up the street killed all the phone lines in my neighborhood. I called in the trouble. They fixed the trouble, but my phone still didn't work. I complained all morning long. Finally, a tech came out and the trouble seemed to clear up. He started to leave and it all started again. I looked at him and said he wasn't leaving until he fixed it. He came back and thought of only one solution. He said the only thing he could do was to clean up all the wiring in the network interface device. I said do it. He spent an hour and now, I seem to have a clean phone and DSL connection. At least until tomorrow.

It's time for fiber optic.

Tom