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Verizon has jerked me around on more that one occasion. They seem to feel that all customers, particularly land lines, are things that just exist to be milked. Their annoyance is painfully apparent when such things moo. Their web site, like most corp sites, is virtual reality phone jail, spinning the navigator in circles until the hopefully give up and go away.
Now, our home phone hardware is quirky at best. Add to that a number of basic service complaints and the question has loomed again, do we need a land line? Rather than go from a place of "get rid of the evil buggers", it seemed like a good idea to look at the bills.
Which is how I found out my last bill kind of got lost in the e-mail: "Change effective 12/08/2007: In compliance with FCC rules to safeguard your personal information, Verizon must ask you to sign in to your account (or register) before viewing account details." The result of this is that they never sent me my bill and I never paid it. It's naturally due tomorrow. I reluctantly gave them a credit card number.
Verizon wireless, if anything, treats their paying customers even more like chattel. They have a particularly sleazy practice of renewing and renegotiating contracts even if they preform the most basic services. Better yet, they don't tell the customer when that happens! We had to replace one phone. Not the get new one and auto renew contract deal, just replace busted one. Bing, renewed contract; customer was not told. To add insult to injury, it was renewed for only that phone, on a family plan. Now it is technically impossible to extricate from this company without breaking some contract. More on the shady bastards here.
I'm willing to take the contract breaking financial hit, just to be free of such unscrupulous pricks. The real question is, is there any company I can use that it's also pond scum? I suspect I'll have to choose the type of scum I'm willing to live with. I want to scum that's contract free.
Anyone have any success or horror stories for getting rid of land lines or dealing with telecom twits?
Now, our home phone hardware is quirky at best. Add to that a number of basic service complaints and the question has loomed again, do we need a land line? Rather than go from a place of "get rid of the evil buggers", it seemed like a good idea to look at the bills.
Which is how I found out my last bill kind of got lost in the e-mail: "Change effective 12/08/2007: In compliance with FCC rules to safeguard your personal information, Verizon must ask you to sign in to your account (or register) before viewing account details." The result of this is that they never sent me my bill and I never paid it. It's naturally due tomorrow. I reluctantly gave them a credit card number.
Verizon wireless, if anything, treats their paying customers even more like chattel. They have a particularly sleazy practice of renewing and renegotiating contracts even if they preform the most basic services. Better yet, they don't tell the customer when that happens! We had to replace one phone. Not the get new one and auto renew contract deal, just replace busted one. Bing, renewed contract; customer was not told. To add insult to injury, it was renewed for only that phone, on a family plan. Now it is technically impossible to extricate from this company without breaking some contract. More on the shady bastards here.
I'm willing to take the contract breaking financial hit, just to be free of such unscrupulous pricks. The real question is, is there any company I can use that it's also pond scum? I suspect I'll have to choose the type of scum I'm willing to live with. I want to scum that's contract free.
Anyone have any success or horror stories for getting rid of land lines or dealing with telecom twits?