In the infuriating world of customer service phone reps and the even more infuriating subset of that world occupied by Verizon, it's good to have a friend.
I estimate that since November I have spent 15-20 hours on the phone with Verizon in pursuit of dry loop DSL. Somehow in my mind I must have built my dry-loop/Vonage combo telecom fantasy into a true Mecca, because God only knows why I have continued to pursue it in the face of such adversity. The reasons and technology behind this journey (I will save $30-40 per month if I ever reach Mecca) are no longer the point.
The point is to hold Verizon to their word and to see if I CAN CONQUER THEM. At least that was my attitude until one day in December, about 8 hours into my journey, when Miss Almonte took my call, transferred from a bitchy queen who was yelling at me for not being home when the repair guy came even though there was no reason for the repair guy to come in the first place and it was their mistake. Miss Almonte is a supervisor in the White Plains Verizon Encore office. She immediately apologized for all of my troubles, said that she is a consumer too and she understands how frustrating this can be. She told me she was going to take care of me from now and and she gave me her direct number! She talked to me in a sweet, calming voice as if she were a nurse and I was a post-op patient in the ICU. She indicated that there would be some fair financial arrangement at the end of it all. Wow! I was so happy. We just had to wait for Vonage to take over the phone number from my old Verizon landline and then we could get going. Everything was going to be ok.
The next few weeks passed fairly easily. Miss Almonte had heard my cries and was on the case. I didn't think about Verizon much. I told my sisters about my good friend at Verizon and I slept fairly well. But then, in early January the troubles started up again. I called Miss Almonte on the day I was supposed to. She left me a message saying she needed my credit card number to proceed. It was clear from her voice that she hadn't gotten my messages. She was wondering where I was too. I called again and again and left messages at the number she had given me--her supervisor's. But she had stopped trying to call me.
Around this time, I doubted Miss Almonte's faithfulness long enough and deeply enough to do the most absurd thing. I called the MAIN TECHNICAL SUPPORT NUMBER, aka HELL. I spent about 4 hours on that part of the journey, half of it just getting everyone to try to locate Miss Almonte within the company for me. According to the five people I spoke to, she didn't exist and there was NO MISS ALMONTE working for Verizon! Was she a fake? Was she just an actor that Verizon employed to pacify irate customers and get them off the phone?
And then, one cold day in late January, I was sitting in a cafe in Evaston, Illinois, and Miss Almonte called me on my cell phone. I leapt out of my chair to get to better reception by the window. What happened, I cried? Why haven't you called me back? Where have you been? She replied with her usual sweet and genuine voice and after giving me some explanation of having been in training for a week and having had a problem with the message system, I forgave her immediately. She told me that the office that needed to do the next step was closed until February 20th for upgrade. She listened to my disbelief of that impossible situation, gave me new phone numbers to reach her at and said, There, now you've got everything except my cell phone and I can't give you that honey. Smile. Giggle. I felt all warm and fuzzy and she apologized some more and said, Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you.
I called my sisters full of the good news: Miss Almonte is back! February 20th came and went and my messages to Miss Almonte went unanswered. In my current job I kept coming across the name of a guy at a New York non profit named David Almonte. I wondered if he was related to Miss Almonte. I daydreamed: Was he going to have Sunday dinner with his cousin this week? Is the family house in New Rochelle, close to the White Plains office where she works every day? But when I wasn't daydreaming I felt very sad and alone. Was I a fool for keeping the dream alive?
Yesterday, she called my cell phone. I'm so sorry! she cried. I've been out sick for a week. I had my wisdom teeth out. Oh, it was so painful. But I didn't forget about you, don't worry. I said, what about the office opening on February 20th? It didn't happen, she sighed. The tone of her voice said, I know, it's awful, can you believe it? But it's open now. Do you still want the service? Of course! i cried. Ok, great, she laughed. She took my credit card number for the second time in two months. We chatted about bank fraud and a recent letter I had gotten from my bank about potentially compromising activity. No, you're kidding, she exclaimed. Oh my goodness, I was noticing on my Citibank account, and you know, I'm anal about my checking account, pardon my French, but that's one thing I'm anal about and recently there was an extra charge for $9 and then another one for $15. Oh my goodness, I need to look into this!
She promised my DSL will be working by March 18th and promised me 3 free months of service. We still have a couple more phone dates before it's all over. I don't know if I'll be ready to say goodbye to her. When it's bad with Miss Almonte, it's really bad. But when it's good, it's a feeling like none other.
Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you. Have a good week, ok?
Aren't those just the words we all want to hear?
Once, many years ago, I moved into an apartment and never set up an account with the gas company. Never saw a bill, it never ocurred to me that someone would go to all the trouble of setting every tenant up with their own gas meter. In my current set up, I pay for heat and hot water and the stove and the landlord made sure I knew that before moved in because it is no joke, that gas bill. But this place back when, it was just the stove I had to pay for and the bill came to about $30 every other month when I did get a bill, and I still think it is absurd that the landlord went to the trouble of putting in separate gas meters for seven apartments so that he wouldn't have to pay for people's stoves, but he did. And no one told me. And one day after I'd been there for a few months the stove stopped working. Pilot was out and it was clear there was no gas. So I went and told the super and of course the conversation went roughly:
Chan: "Well, did you pay your bill?"
Me: "bill? what bill?"
Chan: "the bill you pay to the gas company so they don't shut off your gas. that bill."
Me: "what?"
Sure enough, they'd put a lock on my meter for non-payment. It was winter, and while I had heat, I was sort of in a panic about not being able to have hot food. I called Brooklyn Union and they declared that if I brought a copy of my lease and a money order for the back bill ($40 or something measly like that) to their office in Brooklyn they would turn my service back on sometime after the three day weekend. I was at work, without my lease, which was in Brooklyn but no where near their offices. If I knew then what I know now, which is that you can boil water in a very cheap electric kettle, this wouldn't have been a crisis but I didn't know any neighbors and it was really, really cold and I was getting a flu and I was not going to survive the weekend if they only hot food available to me was toast. After an entire day on the phone (I probably should have just left work and gone to get my dumb lease) talking to customer service people and arguing with them and getting put on hold and arguing some more (but never getting yelled at) I finally got this guy on the line and I said "look, I am going to die of some kind of terrible flu if I can't make some soup and you are going to have that on your conscience when you hear about it and if you had ever sent me a bill or a shutoff notice or anything I would have straightened it out and set up an account but you didn't so I didn't and now I can't make tea or coffee or anything but toast and cereal until Tues-fucking-day and I am going to die. And it will be this big tragic headline thing that you wouldn't turn on my gas so I died from eating only toast and its really just not fair" and at that point I was way past imagining that I was going to get anywhere but I was feeling melodramatic so I gave him this whole speech about the dire consequences of me not getting tea, it was my last hurrah before I went to copy my lease and get a money order and hate the gas company the whole time I was doing it and he was like "let me see what I can do ma'am" and not half an hour later I get this call from Brooklyn Union, the guy is downstairs. He was on his way home and got some call about some special circumstances and they said I needed my gas turned back on urgently. I was completely dumbstruck. A week later I got a bill for the back gas and that was that.
I don't know what the moral of that story is, but I think that America has this bizarre customer service disease. It is like a plague. We take normal people and give them scripts and rules and custom database software that doesn't work and we tell them they have to be nice and polite but they can't do anything for anyone ever. And for the amount of money that verizon spent trying to keep you away from Miss Almonte, the amount of money they paid to customer service consultants and business process experts and experts on business process experts and extra consulting staff to negotiate between the different kinds of experts, they could have paid a lot of Miss Almonte's but they don't do that.
Posted by: amanda | March 20, 2006 at 02:56 PM