by Bill Curtis

Below is a copy of my letter to Verizon complaining about our telephone outage. Dear Sirs, I’m addressing this letter to your Corporate Office because of my total Disgust with the way our telephone service was handled. It is part of our FIOS package.

Late in 2010 we had our TV and Internet service suspended by us for the winter months, the phone service was left on because it monitored my heating plant during the winter. Due to having a Medtronic Defibrillator implanted in my chest on June 21st my wife and I weren’t free to move into our summer home until June 29th.
On July 1st we called Verizon to have our TV and Internet restored, and it was done successfully. (Except the Cable box clock was one hour early) which we didn’t notice due to our being very busy preparing for our family to arrive that evening to celebrate my Wife’s 80th birthday, plus our Grandchildren’s birthday’s, and the holiday weekend.
The first problem we noticed was my Wife’s best friend called on the 3rd (my wife’s actual birth date). She called again on the 4th, reached us, and said she called on the 3rd and our phone refused to take the call. (She now was apparently calling from a different phone that had caller ID.)

After this we noticed a beep, beep, beep when we tried to make a call on our house phone. It was then I realized we had Voice Mail active on our phone. We also got a message, “Service to this phone is temporarily suspended”

Our phone was in service and working all winter without Call Block and Voice Mail, and somehow Verizon activating our TV and Internet service turned those features on. I called Tech Support to see if they could turn off and purge the Voice Mail thinking that might resolve our non-working phone but that didn’t do any good.

NEXT!!! I started to call Verizon, (using a neighbor’s phone) And I waited and waited listening to, “All our associates are handling other customers” while exceptionally poor quality music played on and on. (It sounded like it was playing from a worn out tape) a 30 minute wait was normal. I spent hours and hours on my neighbors phone. I was directed to a Business office that THOUGHT maybe our phone was suspended because of non-payment of our bill. My wife immediately went online to our Bank and saw the check she mailed more than a week ago had cleared, to Verizon.

All the while I was waiting for phone service so I could send my Cardiologist in NJ a readout from my new Defibrillator that was implanted June 21st The Medtronic device required a wired phone.

I also worked with a person named “Angel” from the Business Office, who said she knew what was wrong and was going to send a work order to correct the problem, she and I waited for Tech Support to pick up our call, after waiting to 11:30 PM I said this is ridiculous. Angel said she would pursue this tomorrow. She said she started work at 10am her time, and would call me, at my time of 1pm. I said Great and gave her my wife’s cell phone number, and waited and waited. No call, Angel must have flown back to Heaven.

AT 2:30 pm that day I called the number where I had been dealing with Angel, but whoever answered, barely spoke English and had never heard of Angel. By now I’d had it, I started speaking in a very loud voice, I WANT A SUPERVISOR, I HAVE TO SPEAK TO A SUPERVISOR, I HAVE NO PHONE SERVICE, I HAVE A MEDICAL ALERT, ETC, ETC. This was the 8th of July and like magic I was patched through to Tech Support. I explained that I had a medical procedure that I needed to resolve using my phone and was getting no place and needed a Supervisor.

I was connected to Tom. I was very suspicious of someone with no last name, but he said he’d resolve our problem, and call me on my phone when the problem was resolved. He asked for our Cell number so if there was problem he could call us. In less than an hour he called on our home phone, and said he’d resolved the suspended phone problem. Our unwanted voice mail option would take longer. Next day he called again to tell us it would take awhile for the work orders to all be resolved. A day or so later he again called to say the voice mail was turned off. And a day later he again called to see if everything was OK, and to apologize for all the time I wasted trying to resolve a problem caused by Verizon activating our TV and Internet. Enough said on the subject.

PS. It was quite awhile later that I found out that after that message ‘This phone is temporarily suspended” that if I listened to the whole story, I would have found that by dialing Zero that I could have contacted Verizon.

Today I received a call from Miss Jones from Verizon who was answering this letter. Together we went over my problem, and in conclusion I asked how was Verizon going to recompense me for the extended outage and my hours on the phone trying to resolve a problem initiated by Verizon’s mistakes. Miss Jones resolved the issue quite nicely. End of story.

Bye