My husband and I were trying to switch our dial-up internet to DSL. At the time we had MCI who didn't provide DSL, but to get it from Verizon DSL we had to switch our phone service as well. The Verizon representative that I first spoke with was very upfront about the Local Area and which calls would become toll calls, how much they would cost at different times, and how much everything would be including DSL service and taxes. She said that the normal $40 connection fee would only be $12 for us since we were returning customers, but that she would waive it entirely for financial reasons (since we receive medical assistance for our infant son). She also offered to have the DSL equipment delivered by UPS to require being signed for (since we live in an apt complex I didn't want to risk having it stolen).
I told her it all sounded great and I would call as soon as my husband got home from work. For some reason she really wanted to close the deal right then, and indicated that SHE was the one who could make the arrangements with UPS. I figured what the heck and I switched over and she said it would be 2 weeks for the package to be delivered and installed.
A few days later my husband spoke to someone about the DSL signal strength and he was told that it was strong enough for us to get good service, a little slower but negligibly so. Well 3 or 4 days before the arrival date my husband called to check on the status of the order and we were informed that it had been cancelled! A man told us that DSL isn't available in our area! Why couldn't they have told us this before? And after they already switched our service I would have felt really stupid crawling back to MCI. An especially unfortunate aspect of this situation is that since Verizon just rents their lines out to smaller companies we weren't even able to go to a different company.
So we just kept the phone service and went for cable internet.
Then we got our first bill from Verizon and it had the $40 connection fee. When I called Verizon I told the CSR what I had been told and she said that the $40 was "a valid charge" and indicated that she had no idea about waiving the fee for financial reasons.
So I got duped into switching in the first place, then lied to about the fees! And that girl didn't seem to care much either, so I told her to just cancel the account. She did, and we haven't had a house phone since (because all the other phone companies only provide residential service WITH DSL, and DSL isn't available in our area). Is it me or does nobody care about running an honest business anymore? Because it seems like stuff like this happens all the time.
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