Hating Verizon

I dreaded the task before me, telling Verizon that the kitchen phone wasn't working. In the good old days when human beings still sat behind desks and answered phones, it would have been a snap. Call them up and someone would come over and repair things.

But this is the twilight era for the land-line phone, and getting service for them in 2011 is like taking a railroad trip in the 1950s and 1960s, when American railroads decided they were happier hauling freight, and started treating passengers like dirt.

If you look in the phonebook you'll see immediately there are no Verizon offices that deal with land line phones. Wireless,yes. The last few land line people are evidently headquartered in a distant windowless complex buried behind barbed wire in a bad neighborhood in West Springfield. There is probably a lock on the only door with one of those number codes on it to keep the civilians out. So you either go to the computer and suffer that kind of torment, or you pick up the phone and deal with Verizon's not-ready-for-prime-time Voice Recognition Software. You deal with voices that give you options, say one,two, and three. If the problem is a four, you will be trapped in one of these cunningly designed endless loops. You say you don't have a dial-tone, and they understand. What phone can we contact you on? and you give them that number. They say you can't leave that number, because that phone is out of order. The software cannot understand the concept of an extension phone that is dead, but a main phone that works.

I forgot how I finally got out of that loop and got a human being; I think I pressed a whole bevy of keys at random until something clicked way back in their server network and said, hey we have a nutso Luddite here, let him through to a human. And their humans, if you finally are able to get through to them, are friendly and helpful enough. A guy came out the next day and fixed it, but even the tech rep had his problems,calling us up from the road when he got lost and his official Verizon-installed GPS unit in the truck was confusing North King and North Street.

We talked him in, and everything was Jake. Pay the man $91.50 and wish him luck as he goes out the door. His job and the landline phones he looks after, I fear, are not long for this world.

But you know, when all is said and done, it's nice to have an old-fashioned phone anchored to the wall that stays put and isn't always walking around and making itself scarce when you need it. Coming up soon: more on the Angela Plassman affair and her officially approved replacement. Oh, and the mad genius behind all these intrigues, Wayne Feiden.