Verizon Wireless= Scum of The Earth

AT&T too, as is Amex (I caught them trying to bill magazine subs

as well on this account) gotta watch all these SOBs brothers and

sisters
Lots of places now try this click through trick'in BS, so you

really gotta watch out for these "default" sign up services

as well... Really crappy way to try and get you billed up

on "everything"
Now ok if bacci places wanna do this for me and send me

automatic pounds of my fav flake at 50% off

My wife is none too happy with them, or the 'Droid phone they encouraged her to buy. If I were

in the market for smart phone services, I'd see what else is available. I mostly use two soup cans

and a taut string, myself.

In the "old" days Ma Bell use to add other people's unpaid long distance charges to your bill and hope you didn't catch them. This crap has been going on for a long time.

I had it really bad with Verizon once reguarding their internet. I was on a $15/month DSL plan with them, my room mate decided to switch to a differint phone carrier without notifying me and Verizon charged me a disconnection fee of $80 per day without notifying me untill I called them asking why my $15 bill was well over $300 for the month. They apologized and only removed two of the disconnection fees after spending hours talking to management, I was told to "sue my room mate" for the remainder. Granted they had a right to disconnect my service and charge a fee since my room mate violated their TOS, however they did not have the right to do it every single day over and over just to churn out more money and without any notification. I now use Comcast, which while they do try to sell you stuff, they never just "add it on" without consent like Verizon does and they do not have a disconnection fee.

We had issue of 3rd party billing of 9.99 on our account over several months until I got it blocked. I was told there is nothing they can do, and I was liable for payment. After I blew up and told them to cancel my account, and we'll settle it in court, they backed down and credited my account. You have to figure if only 10% catch it and fight it, they are making a lot of money on the sly. I put cell phone companies on the same plain of existence as car salesmen, criminal defense attorneys, child molesters, drug dealers, etc.

I have personal experience with Verizon from the inside. They were clients of mine for the year before they became Verizon, when they were still GTE and Bell Atlantic. I wrote the training for their new trouble ticketing module, MaESTRO (Management and Entry System for TROubles), and the monitoring module NeMoW (Network Monitoring on the Web). They were the wackiest client I have ever had, worse than the FAA, which took some doing.
Because if they didn't go live (and become Verizon) on December 31st, the government was going to fine them one million dollars a day, folks were scared to make decisions on how the new modules should work. Further, no one was even assigned to make the decisions. I had a guy on my consulting team whose sole job was to open doors and solve problems, and he was never able to procure me a copy of either piece of software. On which I wrote the training.
You'd carry a notepad around with you and, if you overheard someone in a cube saying something that might apply to you, you'd hurriedly write it down, or quickly copy something in the printer room before they came to get it. I didn't see NeMoW till five minutes before I was to train their trainers in North Dallas that had flown in from all over the country. Towards the end of the assignment, I was making the business decisions on how the software should work.
Whatever connection speed you are paying for, their software doesn't even alert them (ie they neither know nor care), until you are actually getting less than ten percent of that. If you drop below ten percent, only then do they get alerted, and may do something about it.
Their TV spokesman, James Earl Jones, had an ad where he said how great Verizon was, because if you signed up now in September, you wouldn't even get a bill until February; aren't we great? The reason was, the billing module wasn't going to be working till February - you could have signed up for any plan they had and not paid your bill, and they wouldn't have even known about it.
I'm just scratching the surface here; any time a Verizon call goes through at all, I'm amazed. BTW, what you already knew about the vast difference between Tier 1 support and Tier 2 is completely true. Tier 1 guys are in a little cube of a building in Long Beach i na parking lot. Their computers are old and crummy, there's holes in the carpet, the walls are just straight cinder blocks on which someone painted fish, and they're hired off the street with no technical skills at all; all they have and know is their little script.
Tier 2 guys are up in Thousand Oaks, in two campuses you can't see from the road what with all the landscaping, there's fountains and fishies, spiral staircases, cool little museum exhibits of old GTE equipment scattered around and a collection of restaurants in their cafeteria, and they're actual techs. The Tier 1 guys' cafeteria consistes of a little cardboard tray with bags of peanuts and candy bars.
When mistakes like you guys mentioned happen, I seriously doubt they're on purpose; you're lucky anything ever works.

This is a lot of hearsay and slander. Mods please close this thread.

I have personal experience with Verizon from the inside. They were clients of mine for the year before they became Verizon, when they were still GTE and Bell Atlantic.

Click to expand...

You must have wrote the training 13 plus years ago for GTE and Bell Atlantic before Verizon existed. Hense your experience is over 13 years past. What company did you work for then? All cell service sucked 13 years ago.

I'm just scratching the surface here; any time a Verizon call goes through at all, I'm amazed.

Click to expand...

Again unsubstantiated slanderous remarks.
I have never had an issue being charged for anything other than my bill with either AT&T or Verizon. Nothing will get charged to a cell phone bill unless someone on the account inadvertently responds to a advertisement for or selects a third party service. In that case the cell phone user agrees to the charges posed to the account. Unfortunately the account holder(the person that pays the bills) will not know until he see's charge posted to his/her account. It is not rocket science. Someone bought something and tried to sneak it past Dad.

Used to work for AT&T, I got this call several times a day. It got to where whenever anyone called, I would check for this charge and take it off while they explained why they were actually callin in for. Also just to be on the safe side still check your bill hex month. There's a loooot of incompotabt people who don't know how to or just are to lazy to actually fix the bill.

I have no experience with any of your carriers but I wanted to add a +1 for wnghanglow. What a great customer service person!

Haha thanks Juni it's been years since I have worked with AT&T my experience may no longer be valid. I'm glad to say I'm done with school and now can actually help people in the hospital

Sam, I work for H&R Block during the tax season and one of the first things we tell customers when we sit down is "we will never give your information to any outside parties without your consent." Ontop of that we make it very clear verbally what they are signing up for and what the charges will be, from whom. There is never any excuse including "well everyone does it" when enough information is given away to third parties without consent (sometimes hidden in fine print with no explinations) to allow third party companies to bill them. Such thinking is highly flawed and unethical. I've quit jobs becfore that did these kind of things to customers and clients, I will not stand for it. No disrepect intended Sam, what you said kind of struck a nerve, but I still like ya

@gwtwdbss

This is a lot of hearsay and slander. Mods please close this thread.

Click to expand...

Honestly, I can't really agree with that. @simnettpratt been here a long time and appears to be just sharing his experience. And anyone over the age of 8 knows to take everything we read on the 'net with a grain of salt.
Personally I find his account interesting (even if dated) but I still don't take it (or anything I read) as the gospel truth. Overall, this thread has been helpful because it reminds us to pay attention to our billings.
A few years ago we caught out propane provider charging us double what we should have been. After we caught them, they said they'd fix it and repay us (never did re-pay us) and starting overcharging a couple months later. Turned out they were screwing most of our area in the same way. Of course we dropped them, but we still lst a lot of money. We wrote a formal complaint to our state's attorney office - who ignored us. Just glad we caught it and dropped them.
All this happened after it was sold to a much larger company out of state. From speaking with some people in the know, we found out it was a directive from the very top.

I've been on Verizon for a few years now. I've only had good experiences with them. Can't recall a discrepancy in billing and they've always been helpful in changing my plan to avoid big overage charges. I will definitely say the biggest bonus for Verizon is I've never dropped a call anywhere in the country.

Having lived in 6 different countries on 3 different continents my experiences have been the same everywhere: phone service providers are gangsters. All of them. everywhere.

Alrighty Sam, looks like I misinterpreted what you had wrote.

Cell phone companies are difficult to deal with, but Verizon is no worse than the others.

They're all crooks in my book. If it ain't a mom and pops shop, I'd just assume spend my money elsewhere. The trouble is today you can't. And that's why they're crooks. Because all the choices suck. If I could I'd live off the grid and use smoke signals instead of cell phones.

I have had Verizon for several years and never have had a problem with this carrier. I am an avid reader of Consumer Reports and every August they have their annual cell phone survey of about 15 to 20 major markets around the country based on drop calls, listening quality and customer service. Verizon has been number one for several years in all major markets (cities) while ATT&T is last in every market. Not editing just reporting. Read Consumer Report magazine.

@gw (and six): gw, I'm sorry you got offended, but everything I said was true. You're right, my experience is thirteen years old. I worked for AtWork Services, a consulting firm that has since gone out of business, and we were subcontractors with Anderson Consulting (now Accenture).
I spent years designing and writing software training and saw a lot of companies. GTE and Bell Atlantic were the wackiest. In a year, they were never able to provide the guy that wrote the training, the software on which he wrote the training. I call that wacky. They paid me $125 an hour, plus a bunch of overtime, plus travel and, in the end, never even used my training. No one was even assigned to make the decisions on how their new modules should work.
I don't know of another business that doesn't even know about it until you're getting less than ten percent of what you're paying for.
When I said I'm amazed when any call goes through, I don't believe that to be slander, because I am amazed. I don't believe it's slander if it's true. I'm not saying they are any worse than any telecom business, I just had some personal experience with them and shared it.
You don't have to believe me; I also, like six believe one should take everything written on a computer keyboard from the safety of one's own home with a grain of salt. The OP complained about his bill and I said I don't think it was done on purpose; getting the machine to work at all is complicated. I spent years with a variety of clients (the FAA, Frito Lay, John Deere, ConAgra, the Salvation Army and others you won't have heard of), and believe some major, but simple improvements to their company culture would improve their service immensely.
You're right, my experience was in the year before they went live becoming Verizon, and is thirteen years old.