Posted: June-25-2010 at 8:53am | IP Logged	Tweet

Our "land line" phone has been out since last Saturday afternoon. It went out during the daily June thunderstorm when we apparently had a lightning hit nearby. Since that time there has been a loud roar on the line, but the line was operable until two days ago when the LED display on the phones started showing "line in use" constantly, and the roar got very much louder.

Last Saturday, before we called Verizon, I took a phone outside and plugged it into the outside junction box (as the phone company always asks you to do) to determine if the problem was inside or outside the house.    It was outside.   We called verizon and the computer automated CS rep (you never get to speak to a real person) did an automated line check, and also responded that the problem was in Verizon's line. The automated CS rep said, "A technician will be dispatched to your location by Wednesday no later than 7:00 p.m."

The automated CS voice said "no later than 7:00 p.m. Friday" when we called back Wednesday night..... after no one showed up.

Hopefully, by 7:00 p.m. this evening the lone Verizon repair technician in our area will have time to come up this way........

In the meantime, if you call our number, you will hear a fast busy, or you may hear it ring and ring and ring (at your end... it doesn't ring here), or you may hear a tremendous roaring noise.  HA HA   We have tried calling our own number all week from our cell phones, and have heard all those things.

Posted: June-25-2010 at 1:03pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Well... guess what?

I was being sarcastic in my remark above about Verizon's "lone repair technician"......

Hadn't heard anything from VERIZON by 2:30pm today, so we called again just to try to talk with a human and see if the repair technician is coming. After over 25 minutes of button pushing and transfers and "Yes" and "No" verbal responses... we finally got a young lady in one of those customer call centers who finally admitted that she only had the standard "prompt card" responses in front of her for various frequently asked questions, and in reality didn't know squat about our phone issue or what could be done about it. She could tell us when a repair technician should be expected, but that was all. So, she finally got us transferred to a real Verizon representative.

First thing we were told is that a repair technician can't possibly be sent out on our issue until mid-July at the earliest... Friday July 16th to be exact, because they ONLY HAVE TWO REPAIR TECHNICIANS in this area, and they are booked up until mid-July.... and there could be other "more urgent" needs between now and mid-July which would cause our repair date to be set back. You could almost hear the verizon rep snickering when she said, "You must not have heard the July 16th in the automated messageseveral days ago when you called, because it would have said Friday, July 16th. I don't know WHY you would have expected a technician todaaaaaay".......

They offered to transfer our land line calls to one of our cell phones, then warned us that the minutes would count against our contract minutes and that we should be aware that we could incur extra charges on our wireless billing.

WHAT?!?!?   

They don't even apologize for the inconvenience.

They did ask why we wouldn't simply do away with our land line and convert to wireless completely...... Well, DUH..... It's because Verizon's cell service in our area stinks. We had excellent service with Alltel... then Verizon bought out Alltel. Service went to H*** in a handbasket, and then Verizon said "you need to switch your service over to become an official Verizon customer. That will fix your issues"..... Uh-Huh... We did that. The monthly bill doubled. The service got worse. So many dropped calls and dead areas that the service is almost useless. Never had those issues with Alltel. We have very minimal cell sevice here at our house now, and even then you must be standing in the exact spots to get signal... turn your head.. and call is dropped..... and those people with Verizon think that we would do away with our land line and go only with THEIR wireless service????   Got to be joking!

So, to be able to receive calls on our listed number, we were forced to have the calls transferred to one of our cell numbers... and will be paying outrageous extra fees when the minutes exceed our contract minutes. Their wonderful non-apologetic supervisory person just said, "That's just the way it is. Otherwise you won't have service until mid-July... or possibly later".  (We have to leave the cell phone laying in one of those three spots in our house where Verizon's signal is strong enough that we can even use the phone..... so, if you call us between now and late July... let the phone ring several times because it takes a while to get to it sometimes.  And we have to put a danged monitor beside it so that the ring of the phone can be transmitted over the house intercom system so we can hear the dad-blamed phone ring.

Ahhhhh... for the good old days of phones which actually worked....

...... and the good old days when phone companies actually provided service instead of SNAFU's.....

Posted: June-25-2010 at 1:56pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Seperate phone line and number for Internet service. It's connected 24/7..... and I don't understand it either. I don't have a phone on the Internet line, but both phone lines come to our house from a telephone pole "way out near the Elk Garden school" via one phone cable. When that phone cable reached our property line, it comes down the pole and is buried  for about 75 yards across our property to the rear of our house. That one cable comes into the phone company's junction/access box which is mounted on the back wall of our house. Out of that box comes two phone lines... one our voice line and the other is the dedicated Internet line.   If we plug a phone into the test jack in that junction box, the same roaring noise (very similar to the roar of Niagra falls) is what you hear.  Verizon did an automated line test while I was on the phone with that cyber lady voice .... Verizon's automated voice said, "Our test has determined that the problem is in Verizon's system. A service technician will be at your location by 7:00 pm Friday".

... obviously I missed the "July 16th" part.......   HA HA 

But, yeah... I don't understand why one line works and the other doesn't since to that point, it is the SAME line. I suppose it has to do with a "digital" issue and not an actual line problem.  I know that it is danged aggravating that Verizon can't do anything for three weeks after the problem, even after they tell you it's THEIR problem..... and they don't even apologize, but just offer to transfer your calls to your cell phone and then say. "But you should be advised it may result in additional charges"......

Posted: June-25-2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged	Tweet

You know me Jack..... I have had that very discussion with some Verizon people this afternoon. They seem to have plenty of people behind the desks who can explain why it is that they can't do anything about fixing THEIR problem and restoring our service for three weeks.... but they have no one in the field with the time to fix it. It is not the fault of the repair technicians in the field.

Verizon just needs to retrain some of it's staff and put them on the SERVICE side of the business.

And believe it or not, we have been on the phone with more Verizon people in the past several minutes as they try to get our calls forwarded to my cell phone. Guess what?!?  They can't do it because the line problem is "somewhere in the line" between Verizon's big junction box up the road near Elk Garden School and our house, somewhere in a long stretch of cable... so we are screwed on phone service. At least this verizon lady said, "We are sorry, but we can't provide you with service through your land line until late July".

She was a nice lady, but her comment was right on the money when she said "we are sorry"...... Verizon is in my opinion about the sorriest excuse for a service oriented company I have ever had experience with.

Posted: June-25-2010 at 3:42pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Question... with the Magic Jack... do I get a new phone number or use our existing published number? If I use our existing number, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. Ya see? That's my big issue and as I explained to Verizon.... my business suffers if people can't call me, and they will try to call the published number.  I'm supposed to, in effect, shut down for three weeks until they can schedule a service call to fix THEIR problem in THEIR phone line?  LOL

Posted: June-25-2010 at 4:30pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Yep... wouldn't help the big problem I have at the moment.

Verizon's ineptitide and inability to provide the service which we contracted with them for can be very detrimental to my business..... and the bottom line is that they don't give a rat's behind.

Posted: June-25-2010 at 5:12pm | IP Logged	Tweet

HA HA.... The phone we are having issues with is our land line which we have had since 1981. Problem is that Verizon does NOT want to service land lines. They push the wireless business. We had a very similar thing happen back when C&P Telephone still operated the system in this area. C&P had a repair technician here that very day and had the phone working in less than four hours. It wouldn't have taken so long that time, but the issue was a problem with the line coming from US19 out our road, and the repair guy had to climb poles and string some new phone line to the point where the line connected with our underground cable. Still, the phone was back in service in about four hours after we reported the outage.

Today Verizon wanted to transfer our land line calls to my cell phone, but they couldn't even get that to work..........   LOL The Verizon lady said, "I have the number forwarded and I keep dialing your home number, but I just get a fast busy, like the line's open. I just can't get it to go through".

Yep... Dat sounds like the problem we reported.......    HA HA Like I told them, It's obviously a digital issue with the NUMBER itself, because even when they transferred the calls to my cell phone they get the same noise and fast busy.  But she could call my cell phone number itself just fine... as long as I stood on one foot with my head cocked sideways while leaning over to one side facing due North....  LOL .... or I could drive out the road about 100 yards where we actually have cell service......

Posted: June-25-2010 at 9:46pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Hey WooWoo... I also forgot to mention in my reply above.... Verizon's own person in the Verizon store programmed our new cell phones when we officially switched our really good Alltel regional calling plan to Verizon's pathetic (at least in this area) national plan.

That was supposed to "fix" all the issues with dropped calls, dead areas, etc. which we had experienced since Verizon took over the service.

Didn't fix it... in fact the dead areas and dropped calls actually increased immediately, and my service has been pathetic since the switch to new phones and "official" Verizon service.  Plus the monthly charge is now quite a bit higher than my previous Alltel plan which was grandfathered in. I was basically tricked into giving up a good plan.

I also noticed the same personnel structure at the Verizon store as we have experienced with this outage situation... i.e., an overabundance of talking heads and two people who could work on a phone.  HA HA  Even the former Alltel employees who worked there complained of the same thing...... "specialization"...... The little store had two other customers in it when we were there to switch our plan over. I counted 8 employees as we waited. They had a greeter, a sales person, a person with a clipboard roaming around asking "Have anyone helped you yet?"  Heck, it was only us and two other customers.... that girl asked us four times if anyone had helped us yet... We were all standing in the same room. She was looking at us. She could see that the greeter had greeted us and the sales person had told us she would be with us shortly and that the two management types and what appeared to be manager trainees had walked by us at least five times each.....   LOL  we finally got our phones and had to wait on the specialized service tech to program them. One was on break and one was getting ready to go on break, so we were asked to wait. The other six employees stood around unable to look busy. One sort of whispered to us, "When I was working for Alltel I could take care of this and you wouldn't have to wait, but Verizon has everyone specialized. We used to run this store with three people".    And, there is Verizon's problem in a nutshell. That "greeter" hit the nail on the head. Too many managers and sales people and CS people and nobody actually performing service.

And, if they provided a good service and good followup, they wouldn't need such an army of customer service reps and 'talking heads' and greeters asking "Has anyone helped you yet?"......

Posted: June-27-2010 at 1:28pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Have I mentioned today that Verizon has the worst of customer service?

Phone service is phone service. Any one is pretty much the same as any other, when it works. It is the service after the sale which is important... and Verizon is rock bottom in that department.... worse yet, they let us know that they don't really care if we have phone service or not.

Again, it is not the fault of the TWO (yes two) field technicians which Verizon has to handle service calls for thousands upon thousands of customers in this area. It is the fault of a moronic organizational structure with no provision for adequate repair service which will leave my business without phone service for practically a month simply because they can't work a service call to repair their own problem into their schedule because they don't have enough personnel to handle the work load.

We were understanding of their plight last winter during the big snow when my mother-in-law's phone was out of service for almost two months.... but it is summer now, and there aren't miles of downed phone lines in the area..... just one line of about 300 yards in length where the problem has been identified, and Verizon has nobody available to fix it.    Pathetic....

Posted: June-28-2010 at 6:08am | IP Logged	Tweet

This has gone beyond absurd......

Last winter when my mother-in-law's phone was out of service for almost two months as a result of the snow damage, Verizon's "Local Manager for Southwest Virginia" gave us his business card and told us we could call him directly if we ever had such problems again. We decided last evening to call his office number and leave a voice mail asking that he please contact us by cell phone or e-mail. His voice mail box was full....... We tried again early this morning.... still full.

We tried again just minues ago.... still full.....

And, the calls go straight to voice mail... no one answers that phone.

There is an e-mail address on the business card, his Verizon.com address.  I sent an e-mail. It was rejected with the reason given as "user unknown". I am now getting the feeling that we may no longer have a local area manager for Verizon..... Perhaps another brilliant cost cutting measure by Verizon.....

Absolutely amazing how difficult it is to COMMUNICATE with the danged phone company!

(This is my personal opinion and not necessarily the opinion of RacersLounge.com)

Posted: June-30-2010 at 2:39am | IP Logged	Tweet

Beginning 12th day of trying to operate a business without phone service because of having service with a company..... Verizon..... unable to repair its own equipment due to inadequate staff and uncaring sarcastic company philosophy.

Deregulation does not work for companies such as Verizon. Verizon NEEDS to be regulated, and needs to be forced to either provide the service or get out of the business. 

Verizon is the absolute worst.

No response to the fax I sent to their local area office fax number. I can only assume that no one works there anymore. I plan to go to their local office today and park my truck in their entrance way. There is no public access to their office, but perhaps I can talk with a Verizon representative if they can't get in or out, and have to ask me to move my truck.   HA HA

Whay a poorly run company, and what pathetic customer service......

Posted: June-30-2010 at 10:35am | IP Logged	Tweet

Still more than 16 days away from the day when Verizon "thinks" they might be able to send a repair technician out to check on and hopefully repair the problem with Verizon's phone service to our location.

Verizon tentatively has repair scheduled for July 16th, if nothing more urgent comes up in the interim.

Pathetically moronic staffing by a company run by obviously poor management.

I vote to Re-Regulate the telephone industry.... and I am but one poor little voice..... but I have sent communications to ALL of my political representative asking for Re-Regulation of companies such as Verizon which have shown that they cannot (or will not) provide acceptable service in their free-reign monopolistic state.

I have heard other service outage horror stories similar to mine over the past few days, and I have urged each and every one of the people who told me their own stories to do as I have done, and contact ALL of their local, state and federal representatives about the uncaring, sarcastic, pathetic attitude of Verizon's management.

Posted: June-30-2010 at 11:25am | IP Logged	Tweet

MajicJack works fairly well.  It does have a few drawbacks.  1) You get a new number. 2) It ties up your computer; the way they keep the cost down is to bombard you with ads and you can't use your pop-up blocker to prevent them (solution: put it on an old computer and don't access the NET from that computer very much.)  3) If you loose power, you also loose phone service (DUH).  You are pretty much tied to phones connected to that computer or cordless phones (you know...the ones you can never find and/or they always need re-charging)

We use ours to supplement our land line to keep LD cost down.  It does have a feature so that if you call someone and they use the 'odd' number off of their Caller ID to call you back; then you can forward incoming calls back to your 'land-line' at no charge.  Call quality is good and they say they will have number portability by the end of the year.

JUST FYI

Posted: June-30-2010 at 1:03pm | IP Logged	Tweet

Yep... I'd really like to keep the phone number we have had for over 30 years. It's just really hard on a business, for which most orders come by phone, to have that number which is seen in a LOT of places suddenly not working. Any of us can understand a day or two to get it operating again... and as I said in an earlier post, we certainly understood during last winter's big snow when my mother-in-law's phone service was out for so long. But, to take this long to be able to schedule repair service in the summer is absurd.

They suggested transferring all our calls to my cell phone, and I agreed to that (even though they warned us that we would be charged for any minutes which exceeded our contract cell plan)..... then they could not transfer the calls because of the nature of their problem..... i.e., their equipment has our line open as if it is in use.

We then asked if we could purchase a new cell phone, disconnect the land line, and have our home number programmed in that new cell phone. Nope... not an option..... I had also asked if we could do this on a month-to-month basis instead of a long-term contract. That absolutely was not an option... but, then they couldn't do it anyway even if we agreed to a minimum one-year contract.   HA HA

Posted: July-01-2010 at 6:38am | IP Logged	Tweet

Sad thing is that dealing with Verizon (or any major corporation for that matter) is similar to dealing with the federal government. I am just one individual person. They are huge with thousands of employees. None of those so-called customer service reps are local people, and none of them gave even a hint that they cared the least bit about the seriousness of how this phone outage affects us or our business. In short, neither Verizon nor Verizon's employees give a rat's behind about individual customers. They are too big for that.

That is WHY companies such as Verizon absolutely should not be allowed to create monopolies in public service type industries. In this situation, we have no alternative. We are forced to sit and wait on an inefficient uncaring giant company to be able to restore a service which is vital to my daily operation of the business which provides our means of putting food on the table.

As I mentioned earlier, I have sent letters to ALL of my political representatives.... local, state and federal. All that does is allow me to vent frustration and plead for help. The local representative will have read his letter. The state and federal representatives will never even see my letters. The letters will have been read by secretaries, interns or the like, then logged and either trashed or filed. From the state and federal representatives I will receive a nice form letter thanking me for contacting them and thanking me for my support. (And, my letters never mentioned support... they asked for some help with a problem).

The Better Business Bureau?  Yep, I can file a complaint and it goes in the stat file which will add one more complaint. In the end though, it doesn't matter how bad Verizon's BBB rating might be as far as land line phone service in my area..... What is the alternative service?  HA HA   And, you better believe that one of Verizon's so-called customer service reps let us know that last week.... as in, "Well, sir, just what other option do you have? You will have to wait until our service technician can get to it if you want phone service at all".    ... and the %$#*@ was right........

Posted: July-03-2010 at 8:29pm | IP Logged	Tweet

As an indication of just how much Verizon cares, after we explained to them that being with out the land line phone for that length of time would be a major blow to our business, one of their so-called customer service reps told us last week, "Well, if you are threatening legal action, I think that Verizon has better attorneys than you would have".

We never once indicated any sort pf legal action..... We just tried to explain that being without the phone would be devastating to our business. Bottom line is that they don't give a hoot and they don't mind to let you know that.

We even asked if we could pay the cost for (i.e., salary , etc.) for one of their two repair technician's and have them come here after hours or on the weekend. The CS person sort of laughed at that suggestion.

Verizon needs to be regulated... and definitely needs some common sense management.