Yesterday I called Verizon to try and resolve the phone porting issue and, at the least, get all calls on that line forwarded to another number in our house. I know from past experience that once the port happens the forward just instantly stops working and it’s all fairly seamless.
Anyway, I call them and reach a woman who listens and says, “I need to transfer you to technical support to get the forward going.” So she transfers me. I sit on hold for 15 minutes and then the call just dies. Great. I call back. Oh, before I forget, their automated messages are annoying to no end. Several layers of questions to answer before you really get anywhere. So I call back and reach another woman who also tells me I need to be sent to technical support. I do get transferred properly and after a few minutes I speak with a guy. He listens, looks into a few things, and then says that he can’t do anything and that I need to speak to the orders department. He transfers me. I get a woman who says she’s in the orders department.
So here I am back in the orders department which, it turns out, is the same department I’d been in twice before. I explain everything again and she seems stunned by the porting issue. She formulates a plan. She wants to cancel the order and cancel the phone line. I know just enough about the process that I know this isn’t good. Why? Once the order is canceled my phone number, which I’ve had for a decade and is a vanity number, will be lost. It will go back into the general pool of numbers. She gives me some song and dance that my other provider has a means for requesting that same number again. Right.
I tell her not to do anything. She then looks into putting call forwarding in place. She tells me that it’ll cost me because the plan I’m on has no call forwarding and it’s a monthly charge plus a one-time fee. What?! I need to pay to do something small that will help alleviate a problem they created? Nice. As I contemplate this she asks if I’ve already initiated porting the number back to the other provider. I tell her I had just that morning. She seems miffed by this and informs me that, as a result, the phone service is now on hold pending the transfer and nothing can be changed.
Bottom line for us is that we’ll have to do without that phone for the week or so it’ll take for the number to port over. I did hook up a phone line to the box in our garage and set up our voicemail and cleared out all the old messages. The new greeting tells people to just call our cell phones for the time being.
The last item is on the Internet side. When the sales guy called he mentioned all the various speed options for the Internet service. One jumped out at me. The default speed here is 20/5 meaning 20 Mbps download speed and 5 Mbps upload speed. For $12 more a month they have a 20/20 plan and for an online gamer that’s a huge benefit. We do a lot of uploading. I tell the rep I want it. His response is to just tell the installer. I tell the installer and he says he has nothing to do with that and that I need to just call the order department to get that set up. When I first called I was told not to get it because the price was about to get much better and that, frankly, they couldn’t even offer right then for some technical reason.
I mentioned it to the final person I spoke with above and she said that I can never get it as it’s only for business customers. She said that their system won’t even allow them to order it for residential customers.
Well, here’s their own page about it and it doesn’t mention anything about this “requirement”. Why can’t I get this service????
