Posts Tagged ‘sucks’

Do you hear a strange buzzing sound on your landline? My girls grandmother did and this has to be the end all be all of crappy customer service. My better half told me about her grandmother having trouble with her internet service. This poor woman has had problems for over a week. Mind you this is a FIOS customer, that is using the digital phone for DIAL UP service. She could be using broadband, however Verizon told her that her computer is not compatible.

Her computer is nothing special, neither is it too old for broadband. It runs XP, has a 2.0 GHz P4, and 384M of RAM. Plenty for broadband. Anyway,  that is not the main gist here. The real problem lies in what Verizon told her on the phone. After waiting on hold for more than an hour on multiple occasions, she was told it is not Verizon’s equipment at fault. Since they are able to ‘see’ the outside device and it is reporting no error it must be her equipment.

This went on for a week or more before Verizon told her that if they send out a technician, it will cost her $150 to troubleshoot it. Now here is the kicker; they also told her ‘if the technician cannot fix it you will still have to pay the $150.’  OMG, what the hell are they smoking at Verizon?

So today I packed a small tool bag with some phone tools and we drove over. Immediately, I noticed a hum on the phone line. A hum will cause all kinds of issues with a dial up connection. I went out back to the Network Interface Device (NID) and hooked my phone into it. Clean dial tone with no hum at all. Ok,  so it’s in the wiring- now let’s find out where.

This is a house that has a new digital node. It also has remnants of the POTS (plain old telephone system) or analog service. As I opened everything up including the Analog box, I noticed that the POTS service was still connected to the house wiring. Not only was it connected it was also supplying E911 dial tone (albeit fuzzy/full of static).

So I think,  OH NOES! It’s a back feed issue; I clipped the analog wires from their posts. The HUM disappears completely, DIAL UP service is restored, and I am done before they know what happened. A very happy grandmother, which makes my girl happy, and me look like a genius.

Really Verizon..Get you head out of your A$$. It was your problem, one of Verizon’s half-assed techs either hooked up the POTS system when they shouldn’t have, or it was never disconnected when the digital NID was put in. Regardless Verizon should have rolled a truck at their expense.