So you could say I spend a good deal of money with Verizon wireless. A $300 palm treo, $85 per month for the service and that is after my 20% discount that I get for working at a major university. One would think that this would at least make your monetary contributions to the Verizon empire at least worth acknowledging, right? Apparently not.
I have had a lot of trouble with my Treo 700p (I have had 3) and after doing some research found that very few people were having the same problems with the 755p. I thought that it was not to much to ask Verizon to replace my 700p with a 755p since they were the same price on the website and considering that I have been a loyal customer for so many years. They did not agree, and in fact they offered to let me "upgrade" early.
"So let me get this strait," I asked, "you want to LET ME give YOU another $300 so that I can have a phone with the same processor and memory etc?" Apparently that was what the salesman had in mind. At that point is became more about the principle of the matter than it was about the actual phone. I visited the store daily and called every Verizon number I could find trying to get someone to see things from my point of view. I even went so far as to email the CEO. In case you are interested the contact information for many of the Verizon executives is listed on consumerist.com. I never got a reply to my email and if it was not for a guy named Jason at my local Verizon store I think I would still be fighting with them over the phone.
That being said I can not believe that I even for a moment considered using their new fiber optic service. I tried to use their web page to see if the service was available in my area, but by this point I should know very well that service is not what Verizon is about. They have an applet that is worse than a bad phone tree...you give it an address and it gives you a wrong match...not even close...given the option to say "no that is not correct," it goes through the same loop again. You can type it in again (like me typing in the wrong address is the most likely error). Any engineer that was worth his salt would at least give the user the option to select from the closest matches, right? So I call the provided number to talk to a guy who wants my name phone number and address so he can tell me that he can't help me that I need to call a local number. Why can't that be the first part of our exchange? So I call that number, and I get a Lady who is rude and apaprently using the same website I was using in the first place!
I guess the article I read the other day where the CEO was ranting and raving about how miserable his customers made him should have clued me into the fact that Verizon could care less about their customers.
Verizon is the only company in the world that makes Time Warner look good! Their slogan should be "It's all about the network, and you...yeah we couldn't care less about you!"