Fifteen days into the new year, and I’m still wrangling with corporate bureaucracies and trying to get the services I’m paying for from the telephone company, FCHP and my bank.
Let’s start with the phone! Some years ago, I don’t recall exactly how many, I decided I was paying far too much for phone services that I never used. I had a monthly charge for AT&T Long Distance but I almost never made a long distance call. I was paying a hefty amount for local phone service, on two lines, but I used the phone very seldom. I decided to keep the dedicated modem line on basic local service, cancel all long distance service, and strip my main home line down to something called “Measured minutes” which means that I paid a per-minute fee for every call, even down the street. Then, I got pre-paid calling cards, programmed the numbers into my phone’s speed-dial, and used the calling cards for all my calls. Because I had clever ways of getting calling cards with great rates for little or nothing, this worked very well for me for several years. My phone bills went down by two thirds.
Like many great things, this plan started to fray over time. When I left the shelter, one of my sources of “recycled” high-octane calling cards dried up, and eventually the one I was using on the phone expired. My cut-rate scheme was okay when I was a starving human services worker with no life–but when I started up my own business, it was desperately inadequate. I knew I’d have to upgrade my phone service, but I had been procrastinating on it. When the last calling card expired, I blithely made calls at the “measured minutes” rate, telling myself that it wasn’t going to be that much, and I’d be upgrading my phone service soon.
We all know what happens when you roll along with that kind of attitude, right? A great big cold splash of wake-up call on your head! In this case…the conference calls for Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE) in December. The last time I’d participated in one of those, I still had a calling card to use. In this case, I didn’t…and I just wasn’t thinking. It didn’t connect with me that the conference calls dialed into a toll number in Sloan, Iowa…or that I paid 40 cents a minute for them on the Measured Minutes plan. Then I got a phone bill for $122! Whoa!
Well, it was all my mistake. I paid the bill, wincing, and added the calls to By Light Unseen Media’s expense ledger (they’re deductible, but…ouch). But I’m on the Board of IPNE now, so I need to be in the conference calls. I also was looking at phone calls to printers, to authors, to other publishers, to vendors…much more phone use than I had in the shelter days, and nearly all of it business-related. Not only that, but my social life is reviving now that I’ve escaped from the crypt of Dracu-job. It was time to get that phone service upgraded to something much more appropriate for my needs as a small business.
So, I logged into Verizon’s website, where I have an account, and reviewed their plans. Now, you would think that a company that markets Internet services would have a decent website, right? And you would think that a company that encourages you to manage your phone service online would do that competently, right? Well…when all the dust settles, it might be okay, after all. But at the very least, if you’ll excuse the major irony here, I have to say that Verizon has a serious communication problem. Their website, to put it bluntly, sucks.
I reviewed the available services, selected a plan, chose options, and punched it through. I got an e-mail confirming my “order” that same day. Two days later, I got an automated phone call from Verizon confirming that my services were in place. And they were–as far as I could verify. I had Caller ID, call waiting, calls going to voice mail if the phone was busy, a voice mailbox, which I set up. (The shelter had one, so that’s very familiar–although I swear, I was the only person at the shelter who ever figured it out!) However, I didn’t have any way to verify, until my next bill, whether I was really being billed for calls on the new plan. I assumed I was, and I called into two more IPNE conference calls under that assumption. But…when I logged into my account at Verizon, the account still showed the “Measured Minutes.”
So, yesterday I was on the phone with Verizon…and by the way. Verizon has an answering system that absolutely drives me insane, because it’s designed to create the illusion that you’re talking to a live person. When you’re prompted to input your phone number as an ID, this voice, with a very natural inflection and tone, says, “I’m looking at your records now.” At this point I always have to stop myself from screaming, “You are not!!! You’re a fucking machine!! Stop screwing with my head!!!” Of course, by the time I resort to calling Customer Service, I’m usually pretty strung out. *wry smile*
Anyway, I did get to a real person, a chatty guy named “Robert,” who was somewhat perplexed by the disparity between my having services and their not showing up on my account. But after we’d gone around the situation several times, with a digression in which he proclaimed the new high-speed optical fiber Internet service that Verizon is installing and how fast it is (Yes. That’s fast. Now, about my account.), a light bulb went on. It’s possible, he said, that the new services won’t show up on my online account until the next billing cycle, after the 19th. He agreed that I should not have been paying for the last IPNE conference calls in “measured minutes,” and he said that if my next bill shows that, call Verizon immediately, and he’d make a note on my account.
Today, I received a packet from Verizon in the mail welcoming me to my new plan, and including a whole user’s manual for the voice mail box. That seems auspicious…but until I actually see my next bill, I’m a little nervous about making all kinds of toll calls. *sigh*
Today’s mail also contained the packet from FCHP with the wrong plan on the card, so I called them. I’d actually tried to call FCHP yesterday to follow up on last week’s phone calls, but they were closed “due to inclement weather” yesterday. Customer Service at FCHP told me that I am in their system on the correct plan, another card and packet was mailed on Friday, and I should get that this week. We’ll see! But, really–was all this aggravation and wasted money, effort, time and paperwork really necessary?? Doesn’t it make a lot more sense not to screw up to begin with?
Then there is my bank! I don’t trust huge multi-national banks. (Anyone see the news about Citigroup and Bank of America today?) My accounts are in a small local bank–very small and very local. You would think that a small local bank would have better customer service! But I called yesterday trying to get the answer to a question about electronically transferring funds. The branch manager said she’d call me back and never did. So, today, I went to the bank, which is down the street, and talked to her in person. She called the main branch and spoke to someone who apparently went down to the lunchroom in that branch and asked someone else. Then the branch manager gave me a phone number for the electronic banking department, explaining that they were “very short staffed there.” (I’d signed up for electronic banking and hadn’t yet gotten my confirmation e-mail.) I came home and tried calling the electronic banking department and was treated rather rudely. The electronic banking department said no, they only handle online bill payments and the bank needed to answer my question. I said, “they sent me to you,” and she made this snorting noise. Anyway, I said thank-you, and she snipped, “I’m sorry.” I felt like saying (and the next time, I will), “You aren’t the least bit sorry. Don’t lie to me on top of being rude.” *sigh* So, there’s more wrangling ahead on this issue.
All of 2008 has been like this so far…in fact, this pattern has been in force since the Solstice! I endeavor to do some small thing, and it morphs into a huge mess. Or, I head out for a routine errand and wind up stymied. I volunteered to update a line or two on the IPNE website–and wound up parsing code for half an hour because Firefox changed all the image pathnames when it saved the file, and I didn’t know it would do that. (I now hate Firefox, for that and several other reasons, and will no longer use it. Death to Firefox!) I replaced a windshield wiper blade on my car, decided the next day that I should replace the other one, stopped at the little auto parts store–and they’d closed at 1:00pm. I went to the transfer station with the recyclables, and the glass bin was being emptied, so I couldn’t drop off the glass recycling. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve felt like I’m driving down one of those private roads that are all speed bumps: I can’t ever go more than five miles per hour and I keep banging my head on the ceiling of the car. 🙁