[Note: This item comes from friend Steve Goldstein. DLH]


From: Steve Goldstein <steve.goldstein@cox.net>
Date: November 20, 2009 10:00:34 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Bye-bye, Verizon, and good riddance!

Personal experience: Verizon Service is an oxymoron. Cox Communications totally shines by comparison.

The facts, ma’am: We had two-line copper wire telephone service (from the time when one line was almost dedicated to dial up Internet) with the corporate progression of Ma Bell, Bell Atlantic and finally, Verizon for about 20 years. Years ago (do I date myself too much?) when something went wrong with our phone, we would dial 611, and one of Ma Bell’s friendly real people answered and dispatched a cousin to fix it within a day if it could not be trouble-shot and fixed from the Central Office. NO MORE! Line 1 went dead on November 3. When I connected to Verizon’s Network Interface Device, no dial tone could be heard on Line 1, meaning that the trouble was on their side of the divide. At first, I could not find a telephone number to call to report the outage, but I was able to to report it on the Verizon.com web site. When I finally found a telephone number for reporting the outage, all I got was the “press n” recorded message runaround–probably a less effective way of trying to report it than on the web page. During the next eight days, I got spurious calls on my iPhone that spoke so fast that I did not realize that they were from Verizon until it was too late to copy down the information, but one purported to say that my situation had been resolved (as in “we resolve to screw with this customer”?).

Finally, on day 9 (Nov. 12th), I got a phone call from a Verizon technician (Mickey); he was on the way to my house to repair the outage. Well, Mickey was no mouse. He knew his stuff and fixed the problem which was caused by a faulty pair in the pedestal in the street (corrosion, he surmised). But, by then, I was so fed up with Verizon’s poor responsiveness that I had already placed an order to switch my service to my cable and Internet provider, Cox Communications. But, I did not tell Mickey about that, because I was not sure that Cox would show up as promised.

Cox showed up at 8:30 AM the next day (Friday, the 13th, to boot!), and to make a long, sad tale as short as possible, I had two technicians here who seemed to know their stuff, but they could not make my internal phone setup work (I have all kinds of line-branching in the house, some of which I created myself over the years as I tapped the wire bundles downstream to add jacks in rooms that previously had no service — none of it documented; also a tangle of wires at the entry point that resembled a tumbleweed)–they finally left me with a totally bollixed system at 6:30 PM, and asked me to call in a further repair order, which I did.

To my pleasant surprise, Cox called me back on Saturday, and another Cox technician arrived on Sunday evening at 4:30 PM, a half hour earlier than scheduled, and in 1-1/2 hours had the whole house, both Lines 1 and 2, back and working! Somehow, he was able to spot two wires in the tangle that the others had failed to connect, and he connected them. He also found that the FAX on my HP All-In-One printer was shorted out, and was therefore causing the phone in my office to malfunction (actually, I later diagnosed that the problem was that I had connected it with a 4-wire telephone cable and not the 2-wire one that had been supplied with the printer).    The Cox guy was great, and even more to the point, I was able to work through my situation with a real human being in an office not more than a 20-minute drive from my home, and service was swift, responsive, and self-correcting when they did not get it right the first time. I have always held that the true measure of a system is not whether or not it fails, but how it responds to fix the failure. Kudos to Cox on that score!

So, bye-bye and good riddance, Verizon, Fiends of FIOS, and welcome, Cox!

–Steve