Thursday, July 3, 2008

Wherever I am it's NOT VALID

I haven’t posted now for several days because I’ve been in Verizon DSL hell, whence few mortals ere return. The Verizon voice prompt, the most annoying in the world with the tones of some supercilious kindergarten teacher/drill sergeant, doesn’t understand the words “repair” “tech support” or “fuck!” but demands I say the 3-digit number on my bill after which it insists on reciting to me the particulars of what I’ve paid and what I need to pay and the due date and when I—somehow—get to a place where I’m finally asked what operating system I use (whew! almost there) I’m put on terminal hold and forced to listen to a power-down-power-up message (“it will fix most problems”) and told how I can also get help at Verizon Online, which only adds insult to injury when the problem is that I can’t get online—and then—and then—I get a message saying that “Due to unusually heavy call volume all representatives are helping other customers, please call back later.” I go through this so many times that when I finally get to the guy in Bangladesh (conveniently named “Robert” or “Ed”) who’s supposed to help me, I feel guilty because he’s probably a really nice person who’s trying his best and I’m a raving maniac. But today I decided to screw Verizon and sign up for cable, so got on another computer and went to the Time/Warner site (“order online in only 4 minutes”) where I type in my address and zip code only to get the message… “Sorry, the address entered is not a valid address…”

But I'm going to beat this. I can do it. I promise.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a useful site for getting (more) directly to a person:

http://www.gethuman.com/gethuman_list.asp?bname=%22V%22

good luck

Joanne Mattera said...

Who did you say you were?

Anonymous said...

Telecom Tech Help.
This also happened - A couple of years ago, I was having one of those all day on the phone with tech help in India or someplace. On maybe my fourth call, I was given a woman with a very thick accent who I simply couldn't understand. To compound the issue, I have a very Kansan lazy language and she couldn't understand me. Our "charming" conversation ended with her yelling at me and hanging up. Even though I was still stuck with my issue the experience left me feeling oddly victorious.

Anonymous said...

Well, clearly you have to stop tearing holes in the space/time/telecom continuum and relocate to a valid place. :-)