Verizon has failed me again…or at least technology has.

May 9, 2008

I can’t believe that I’m thankful to be at work. What’s surprising about the past couple of days is that on Wedensday, my Internet was working just fine. I arrive home after work to find out that my computer can’t connect to the Internet. I checked the router and it is completely dead. No lights on and no one is home. So I’m checking all the plugs and ports, switching the damn thing on and off to no avail. I call Verizon because we have their FIOS bundle package thing and the lady tells me around 6-7pm that my router is faulty and they’ll send another one over…

Umm…okay, but let’s revisit an earlier episode in October 2007 where this same issue happened and resulted in me being offline for several days without ANY Internet. And now you’re sending me another router? The Verizon lady tells me that they have received a batch of faulty routers and AC adapters so I managed to get one of those. But c’mon…serious? In the span of 8 months, the router dies? Aren’t these things supposed to last a while? It’s not as if I’m throwing it around or dropping it on the floor. It’s stationary on the desk and not moving!

So it’s just the same situation as last time…they tell me to take the walljack cord and plug it into a computer, which I do, but it doesn’t work. The IP address is all wrong. They tell me to enter in some command prompts and flush the DNS and even renew my IP. Nothing works. No connectivity. I instruct the Verizon lady to manually reboot the entire system and she informs me that our phone call will be cut off. At this point she was rather abrupt with me when I tried to ask her whether she’ll call me back after the system reboots or should I call back - to which she replies that I need to talk to tech support and then cuts off the system. That’s it? You don’t even say goodbye? Just some half-ass answer and that’s it? Did I ruin your day by calling you? Did I interrupt your conversation with some other poor shmuck who absolutely must talk to that you’re rude to me like that?

Well suffice it to say, it worked…for a while. Later in the evening, the Internet goes out again (not the router’s fault since it was unplugged) and so I call back and get another Verizon “customer support” guy. Anyways, he tried to help me out too, but then ultimately gave me the proverbial “finger” by getting fed up with me and when I restarted my computer, he had the cajones to say to me “well you’re going to have to call back later on if you have any questions…bye” and that was it? Geezus…why are you guys so irritated over this problem? You’re troubleshooting it over the phone…I’m the one who’s experiencing the Internet outage. Frick, you guys HAVE Internet…I don’t so quit your complaining and help me!

Ultimately I called back for the last time of the night. I spoke to this great guy which I can’t remember his name and he was very helpful…calm…and tried everything and anything to help me out. There’s always that one person that you want helping you and this guy was it. Well unfortuantely I didn’t get the problem solved and I’m still offline at home, but he said that it might be the cable jack/port that’s the problem so he might have their tech guy come out to service it or hopefully have the network operations folks fix it from there without inconveniencing everyone else.

I’m therefore left to be Internet-less this weekend until the new router comes in on Monday (hopefully it’ll arrive this Saturday)…could I possibly be going cold turkey? We’ll see…

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Posted in Internet, Technology