On October 24th, I was on a call (on my residential land line) when suddenly I heard a noise that sounded similar to the clicking that a rotary dial phone would make. The person I was speaking to also heard it. After this, I was able to faintly hear another conversation going on. I ignored it and finished my call. Later that day, I was away from the house and called to check messages on my answering machine (I don't use voice mail). Played my messages, everything worked fine. But since I was expecting an important call, I tried again an hour later. This time, I got a busy signal. Kept calling back for half an hour, and kept getting a busy signal. After I got home, I checked all the phones - none were off the hook, and none had a dial tone - and I also took a phone outside and plugged it into the Verizon box on the back of my house, where I still got no dial tone.
Called Verizon from my cell phone, which is often unreliable where I live. I was told that the soonest someone could get here would be October 27th. Great, 3 days without a land line and with an unreliable cell phone. I accepted the appointment ("sometime between 8 AM and 5 PM" - yeah, that really narrows it down for me!)... took an unpaid day off work, which I truly cannot afford, rescheduled several appointments, and waited. And waited. And waited. At 4:20 PM today, October 27, I called Verizon and got the message that I was expecting - no one would be coming today. Something about not paying overtime for the techs, and we'll come tomorrow instead.
Are you kidding me? It's ok for me to lose not one, but TWO days' pay now, and you can't pay a tech for one freaking hour of overtime to come fix my phone when YOU said you'd have someone here? I can't afford ONE day without pay, let alone TWO. And seriously, can't you try to break down the schedule a bit so that you can give me at least a 4 hour window, rather than a 9 hour window? I could have at least worked half of the day today!
So now, because of YOUR scheduling problems and unwillingness to pay someone a little overtime in order to satisfy a long-time customer and stick with the schedule that YOU agreed to, I'm out two days pay, I'm 4 days without a land line, and I've got to reschedule an appointment that I'd already waited several weeks for, because I sat on my butt here at my house for 9 hours waiting for someone who was never going to show up. Verizon, what do you plan to do to keep me as a customer when this is all said and done? And if I do stay, how do you plan to guarantee that I won't get a raw deal like this again?
