Installation of my second line – Before I moved into this house six and a half years ago, the jack in my bedroom had been converted into a second line. Recently, I wanted to have it turned on. Speaking to Verizon, I was told that the line could be turned on without a charge and that it’d take about five days.
When I finally decided to have the second line turned on, it turned out that there was a charge to turn the line on and that it would actually take a week and a half to have someone come out to do the wire work in the box outside.
When the tech came out here a week and a half later, he looked dumbfounded when he opened the box. He said that someone had been messing around in there. After working on it for about an hour, he decided that the second line underground didn’t work.
Between the two of us, we figured out that when the buried phone line was fried during a storm a few years back that the phone company never replaced it. They merely switched the main line over to that second line since we weren’t using it. They never told us this though nor reported it to Verizon. This meant that turning on my second line would involve burying another line. This was supposed to happen the beginning of the following week.
It is now the end of that following week. In calling Friday to find out what was going on with this, no one had any answers. I also discovered that the billing for the second line was incorrect. The second line was supposed to have been setup to be billed separately. However, it was combined with the main line. Repair transferred me over to customer service to correct the billing issue.
Customer service fixed the issue, but refused to give me any type of credit for the delayed line installation or for the hassle.
While I was speaking to customer service, the manager from Verizon Repair left a voice mail. Her message stated that someone would be in touch either later that day or early next week about the second line installation. I haven’t heard from them yet and I find it appalling that Verizon hasn’t offered me anything for these delays that are their own fault.
Outage of my main line – About six hours after I got off the phone with Verizon on Friday about the delayed installation of my second line, my main line was completely dead.
I called Verizon Repair on my cell phone. The lady who answered did a line test that said everything was fine. So, she decided the problem was in my house. She wanted everything unplugged for five minutes. I asked her if she wanted me to simply go plug a phone into the box outside. She said no that the problem was in my house. Needless to say, I hung up and called back to get another tech. It was obvious that she would do nothing and the problem was not in my house.
When I got another tech, I asked for a supervisor. While I was on hold, I went outside with a phone in hand and plugged into the box outside. No dial tone. The problem was clearly not in my house.
The supervisor who answered said that she did a line test that came back fine. I told her that I plugged a phone into the outside box and that it wasn’t working. She told me that since it’s a holiday weekend that it’d probably be Tuesday before it’s fixed. I told her that I work from home and missing that much work would surely get me fired. She made it clear that Verizon dispatch couldn’t care less if that was the result.
Finally, I told her that it probably wasn’t only me who had a problem. I gave her my neighbor’s phone number and she did a line test. Thankfully, his line didn’t pass the test. However, they could do nothing until my neighbors all called in and complained. Simply seeing for themselves that the neighbor’s phone didn’t work either wasn’t enough. They had to actually complain. The more people who complained, the greater the chance Verizon dispatch would send someone to fix the outage.
I called the neighbor on his cell phone whose landline I had Verizon test. I informed him that his phone wasn’t working. He hadn’t even noticed. I asked him to also ask his neighbors to call in as well.
I called the phone company back after my neighbors had sufficient time to have called in themselves. I was informed that Verizon was working on the problem and it should be fixed before 9pm the following day.
It was fixed early the following morning. But I find it shocking that Verizon was willing to let me go without phone service for about four days simply because my other neighbors hadn’t called in to complain. A lot of people don’t bother to call in when there’s an outage because they figure someone else will do it. But it turns out that their call is highly important.
I had been hoping and waiting for Verizon to offer DSL in this area because I’m not very thrilled with my cable company. But this issue has put my problems with the cable company into a new perspective. Even though the cable company has a lot of outages, at least they don’t treat me badly. Verizon is the only phone company that offers local service in this area. If I had the opportunity, I’d switch to another company in a heartbeat. It shouldn’t take that much screaming, upset, and convincing to get a company to believe that you’re in an outage and then to get them to fix it.
