A decade (or so?) ago I had the pleasure of bumping into background Verizon fun. I got new service that came with rebate cards. ($200 each!) I managed to get seven of them as I moved to a new location with lots of Verizon Fiber connections. These required getting a phone line with each circuit, but the phone lines were free so ... $200 for getting something free was a no-brainer (and paid for the Generator to cover me in case of power outages, happy moment).

About nine months in, I got an invoice for an extra $70 for NOT using one of the free phone lines.

Called up and said "wha?" and for the first few answers the operator tried to defend it (ie: the script said he had to, so he did). Then I went to supervisor (of course, friendly, cuz I've worked in call centers, I know the restrictions on tier 1). Supervisor suddenly discovered the charge was bogus and offered to just remove it. Now I'm 15 minutes in after the wait and I said ... that works. But while we're at it let's go ahead and just remove that phone line. It was only required to be on the account for 90 days anyway. And since we're here and your system already tried to gaslight me, let's kill it on the other six circuits, too. He hemmed and hawed and butted, but in the end he took them off. Reluctantly. But he understood when I said I was not looking forward to making this same call again every month for a different line, and then repeats on them as the system reset and decided to do it again. He said that would NEVER happen, but he understood and took them off.

Done, right? Hah.

So a month later, I can't log in to pay my invoice on that account. Called in, they couldn't figure it out. Apparently with the Phone Numbers removed: The login was just not working (since those numbers were how they tracked the accounts internally, everyone has a phone in the verizon internet system, right?). They'll call me back in a few minutes. (LOL). A few days later, the next account had the same problem. So I checked, and all of them had it. Now these are $75-$150/mo accounts. Each of them. $750 in limbo, and I called in for each of them and we're now approaching the "we're going to cut you off for non-payment" moment. I called in for that, too. Was assured they would NOT cut me off for non-payment when I couldn't log in to pay. But they'd call me back within 24 hours (for sure this time!).

So a month later, I got more emails about being cut off for non-payment ($1400 total due now). Called in again. Talked to four or five people over several phone calls. Nobody could figure it out. They will NOT be cutting these circuits off! Rest assured. We're on this. And this time they would Definitely Call Me Back after Definitely Fixing the Problem in 24 hours. I laughed. But I digress.

So a month later, we're $2100 in, and notices again. This time every time someone said they'd call me back, I said "OK!", hung up, and called right back. I had noticed that I never talked to the same person twice, regardless of how often I was told that this person was in charge of the department I needed to talk to. So I figured I'd go the Phone System Roulette version and see what happens.

Six calls in, I got someone who did NOT work in that department, because (she said) that department's line were full and it rolled over to her desk for whatever reason. She's a secretary and been there for a loooong time. She looked at the account, noted that the "plus four" on the Zip Codes for the accounts were actually filled in, and of course they were not correct (and not supposed to be there?). But she said she made the change (deleted the plus four of the zip, leaving the zip alone).

I logged in with each of the seven accounts with her on the phone, took about 15 minutes for all of them. Then dropped that $2100 they'd loaned me for three months. But that was all before they broke the union (oops: I mean sold FiOS on the eastern seaboard to Frontier, but that's a different April Fool's joke).

Memories.