Wow! "He had me at hello." Or in this case, "Dear Cretins."
I recently had two, shall we say, "less than satisfactory" experiences with Verizon's DSL team. In the past, I've been somewhat pleased with them. On both occasions it was clear that the "support person" was located somewhere far, far away. I say this based on the very heavy accent, and the delay in our voice communications. When I asked where they were located, I was told "It's against their policy" to tell me. I asked because the problem was clearly related to a local issue--and they clearly had no idea geograhically where I was calling from.
They could not vary from their script, no matter how often I explained that I'd already done all the troubleshooting they recommended--and yes, the problem was without question on their end. I was able to prove this having been in touch with other Verizon customers in the Philadelphia area prior to making the call. Nevertheless, they returned to their script to have me screw up my computer--which I refused to do.
Finally, one of the "help team" acknowledged that they had other customers from my locale with a similar problem who had called--but not enough yet to consider it an "outage in my area." They could not give me the number it takes to qualify as an outage.
Both times, I expressed to them in my own version of English my unhappiness. Sorry, but it was far from poetic. On a 3rd call, I was fortunate enough to reach "a good old boy" from down south who actually knew where Philadelphia was (we talked sports for a moment) and knew what a Mac is. He heard my frustration and assured me that he was putting in my call as a problem on the Verizon end. An hour or so later it was resolved.
Boy, this was longer than I anticipated. But I do feel better now.
