Triumpharate

The new corporate logo of the
phone conglomerate Verizon

7/20/2005


Completing "The Big Three," the phone company Verizon has consistently shat all over their paying customers, treating them like serfs, demanding their "Right of First Night," whenever they want to fuck them.

Well my Independence Day came last October, right after my mom died.

Like I mentioned before, my mother had a very lengthy hospital stay before she passed. This internment period included not only the hospital, but also several stops at different healthcare facilities.

Now the way these places work is if you want a telephone in your room you supply you own and then set up an account directly through Verizon. The hospital, on the other hand, supplies the phone, but the charges for the calls are billed to your home number, again, directly through Verizon.

To make a long story short, by the time she was completely incapacitated, she had several different Verizon bills coming to the house and, unfortunately, she had it directly debited from her account.

One day in September, I took a look at one of these bills and immediately realized that yet another forced sodomy was in progress.

The bill was large with calls made at very odd hours. Ten successive 1 or two-minute calls at 3 in the morning. Directory assistance calls. Operator assisted calls, etc. etc.

The irony of course was that, by this time, my mother not only couldn’t reach the phone in her room but she could not hear anything even if she could.

Unidentified Verizon employee (Face concealed)
resolves a client inquiry at the newly constructed
"Central Customer Care Center" (The CCCC)
located on 9th Avenue and 21st Street in New York.

I immediately got on the phone with Verizon who put me through a myriad of low level "customer care specialists" whom all said there was nothing they could do. When I pointed out the ridiculousness of the charges, describing my mother’s condition, they still were of no help.

Me: But just look at the times of these calls. 3:30 AM…

C.S.R.: She must have made the calls.

Me: But look 3:30 AM, 3:31 AM, 3:33AM…

C.S.R: If that’s what the bill says, then she made the calls.

Me: You mean to tell me that a woman who can barely move, sat on a phone and dialed a number over and over again for a half an hour?

C.S.R.: She must of.

Me: BUT SHE IS PRACTICALLY DEAF!!!!!

C.S.R.: Well…someone did.

After about thirty minutes of hammering my head against the wall with these brain dead jerk-offs, I came to the conclusion THEY were the ones who were deaf.

Giving up, I then demanded to speak to someone "in charge" not really knowing who the hell I would get. After about another five minutes of bullshit I was told I was going to be transferred to a "Mr. Johnson in the Actuaries Dept."

WOW…the "ACTUARIES DEPARTMENT."

Impressive!!!

Mr. Johnson comes on and sounds like a "nuts and bolts" kind of a guy. He reminded me of a Cop you call at the local precinct when you want to follow-up on some kind of traffic accident report.

Unfortunately for the first few minutes of the conversation it is almost an exact replay of the last thirty minutes. But then something happened.

He actually looked at the bill in question.

After looking at the ludicrous call times and durations, he admitted that there was obviously a problem and agreed to stop the "direct debiting" of my moms account. I said, from now on, transfer the account into my name.

He said he couldn’t do that without a written authorization" so I agreed to get a signed letter from my mother which I did that day and mailed it addressed personally to him somewhere in Yonkers almost immediately. He promised to call me as soon as he received it to discuss what calling plan and DSL package I might be interested in.

Everything seemed to be resolved so, you are probably asking yourself,

"What’s my beef?"

What bothered me was the fact that it was obvious that NONE of the people I was talking to at that shit hole were OBVIOUSLY LISTENING TO A WORD I WAS SAYING.

After about 45 minutes of talking till I was horse, finally this Mr. Johnson guy actually LOOKED at the bill and agreed. Everything that came before that rare moment of reason was "on book." Just general scripted responses to my very specific questions.

As far as "customer service" goes, there is only one word to describe that performance:

PATHETIC

But if that were it, I wouldn’t be writing this.

Nope. The steady stream of urination continued.

For example, weeks went by and I didn’t here from Mr. Johnson.

Then my mother passed away.

She died very early on a Saturday morning. I spent the next week taking care of phone calls, funeral arrangements, insurance paper work, etc. One day I come home, during that week, and guess who is on my answering machine.

That’s right, it was Cock Sucking Deush Bag…I mean Mr. Johnson from the Actuaries Department!

The message said he received my letter and is ready to discuss "our services.’

Being that my mom was dead and anything this guy had to say was now completely moot, I laughed so hard, and for so long, I eventually buckled over clutching my stomach with a slight muscle pull.

Now, keep in mind, I mailed that letter a little over a month ago from the Downtown Manhattan post office who send out their carriers once every half-hour. If I mail a letter there early enough in the morning, the recipient could possibly receive it that same day.

Believe me, it has happened before.

AND this clown had my cell phone number.

But I knew I was going to eventually call him back because, as it turns out, I decided to move into my mother’s apartment to help out my handicapped sister. To be honest, I had been a Verizon customer since I first left home to go to college in 1985 and I saw no reason to change.

For those of you old enough to remember, that was right around the time Ron Reagan first busted up the "Ma Bell" (later re-named Verizon) monopoly. For the first time we, the public, had a choice of phone companies to provide our service. Everybody who had any kind of start-up capital opened up a service (MCI, Sprint) and, most importantly, were offering outrageous deals often halfing the old Bell prices.

I, personally, found these services to be less than adequate.

Yes, you would pay half the price but, all of sudden, you would get messages like "all our circuits are busy" when you would try to make a call. That NEVER happened with Verizon so, I stuck with them. It was "you get what you pay for" personified.

I would even tell me people not to switch almost like a mid 80s white James Earl Jones.

So, upon returning to work the following Monday, I called the 914 number Mr. Penis…I mean Johnson…left for me. A woman answered. I asked for Mr. Johnson but he was not there but she informed me that she could help because she was, "intimately familiar with all of the cases."

Within minutes I realized she was bull shitting me so I went through the whole song and dance of my circumstances. And requested that she tell me what Verizon’s different calling plans, DSL packages and costs.

After she gave me about three different choices, all with a disinterested tone that suggested she was going to put no effort into this sale:

Me: Those prices are kind of high. I had DSL from you guys about three years ago and I remember it was a lot cheaper.

Bee-atch: Yeah.

Me: So the price went drastically up?

Bee-atch: I guess.

Me: I’m going to have to think about this. I will call you back.

Bee-atch: Well OK, but we really got to hurry on this because we need an answer.

Me: OH REALLY??? NOW we’re in a hurry???? I contacted you guys over a month ago and you didn’t seem to be "in a hurry" then.

Bee-atch: Yes, but…

Me: I’ll call you back on Thursday.

I hung up pretty disgusted but what was I going to do?

I called Cablevision that’s what.

Oh believe me, I have no illusions. They are just as bad, if not worse, as any other faceless behemoth that would cut your heart out and eat it before your dimming eyes. But, in this case, they offered me unlimited telephone, high speed Internet and digital cable TV for $150 a month.

Hearing about this deal right on the heals of my soul sucking experience with Ms. Personality over at Verizon, I said the only thing I could really:

COUNT ME IN!

And the bonus was I got to rip Verizon a new one on Thursday when I called them back! But, when I returned home from work on Wednesday there was a message on my machine:

Hello. This is I am a fucking asshole, (I didn’t remember his name) I’m calling to confirm your DSL order…

MY WHAT?!?!?!????

He gave some number to call between 9am and 5pm so…you got it…I was on the horn at 9:01AM the next day.

And of course the tool, who was neither Prick...I mean Johnson...or Bee-atch who both were not in, told me not to worry because there was "No order in."

I was satisfied with the result of this call… for the moment.

That night, after another day of mind numbing paper pushing, I arrived home to find a plain brown cardboard box sitting on the dining room table. My sister very enthusiastically told me we received a package.

My mouth quivered and my eyebrow started to twitch as I slowly, ever so slowly, lumbered towards THE BOX.

I read the label:

Verizon DSL Services

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was a DSL modem.

The next day I called the actuaries department and had someone on the line who, "worked with both Mr. Erection…I mean Johnson...and Bee-atch." She sounded like a sweet old lady.

What followed was a ten-minute diatribe about the complete incompetence and unbelievable unprofessionalism that I experienced over the past two months. I detailed their crimes; I gave dates and times; I named names; I used such blunt, undignified language I could hear her blushing on the other end.

I ended my stroke inducing bellow with the definitive statement:

"You have lost me for life."

Like I said before, this person was very nice (or possibly scared) and she ASSURED me that all of my mom's accounts, as well as anything under my name. were closed so there would be no future charges. She also, very politely, asked me to drop the DSL Modem box with a "return sticker" that she would send me on it, at any UPS store which I did as soon as it came.

My long personal nightmare was over.

My Heroes.

To this day, I still receive bills with my mother’s name on it. The last ones were actually from some law firm/debt collectors in Minnesota. Needless to say I use these official looking documents to line the bottom off the litter box.

In this way Meng and Manny get to do to Verizon what Verizon did to me for 20 years.

I don’t intend to make this blog a dull laundry list of my petty complaints against all the corporations that have screwed me over my 37 years on this Earth. If that were to occur, not only would this journal become somewhat repetitive and fairly uninteresting but, more practically, I would probably never leave my keyboard, because the shear volume of words would be a full time job.

And, of course, that would be impossible because I have to put in my forty hours at the sycophantic company I’m currently toiling for.

After all, I have to eat too you know.

But the point is that these complaints are not strictly personal. I would argue that most of you who have stumbled upon my writings have suffered some similar type of indignity and/or robbery at the hands of these very same Houses of Pain who masquerade as pillars of the community.

Why do we put up with it?


All of this reminded me of the time in 1967, during America’s other quagmire Vietnam, when the boxing heavyweight champion of the world Muhammad Ali was drafted into the Army.

He refused to go.

When he was asked why, he famously responded,

"Ain't no Vietcong ever called me nigger."

Using Ali’s logic, whose "Axis of Evil" makes more sense:

The President’s...or mine?

And we could be heroes
Just for one day
Sixth Army