> Wow. My experience with Verizon DSL support was miserable. My old
> office line kept dropping out. I spent hours and hours on the phone
> with them, talking mostly with idiots who made me go through the same
> idiot routine every time. They sent out three techs who couldn't find
> anything. This went on for a couple of years. Finally, they sent out a
> guy who traced the wire out to the street. Turned out there was a bit
> of stripped insulation and some wires were touching.
My anecdotes are of course just that, but Verizon will always get patience from me because they were fast to get DSL to me (10 years ago?), and when they were Bell Atlantic, the phone techs were friendly and extremely capable. I had a problem like your's and was able to get a tech to fix it, but back then the techs were all BA employees, union?, and lived in the area they served.
Being "in the business" goes a long way with tech. support folks when you are legit (i.e. not a Geek Squad worker at Best Buy) because you know what they have to deal with. I've always been especially sensitive for the offshore folks who may be working at horrific hours and get the double whammy of USers racism + technical frustrations.
Once the conversation has been rolling a few minutes and we've gotten a sense that we're treating each other with respect, I always ask for the email address that they want me to cc when I send the thank you note for the good service I am getting. They care and so do the managers.
Anyway...
My alternative for consumer high speed Internet would be Comcast cable, a company with whom I have had nothing but horrible support experiences. I despise the closed-nature of their technology, such as those horrible Motorola DVRs which have ethernet jacks and are CableCARD ready.....but with those functions disabled. Comcrap continued to increase my cable bill, which with an HD DVR, and all the movie channels, sports package, etc. was approaching $175/month. For what??!?!? Day-to-day troubles with their On Demand service, HDMI connectivity issues, not to mention lack of expandability of storage and inability to move my media around (if I paid $175/month to watch True Blood on HBO, fuck you Comcast for preventing me from moving it from the DVR to the laptop so I can watch it on the train to Manhattan!).
I recently cut the cable....mostly. Installed an Ubuntu Linux PC with a cable capture card, and connected it directly to the HDTV. Installed MythTV and Boxee and never looked back. Other than the local networks & PBS, I get little from Comcrap (my bill is now $19/mo). The majority of what we watch comes as streaming shows (Colbert, Daily Show) or as torrents. Not for the faint of heart, but it is satisfying to only give Comcrap the bare minimum business I must.
I do not lose sleep at night getting True Blood via torrent. Hey HBO, I will happily pay you directly to stream the shows I want, but you do not [yet] offer me that option.
Matt
-- GnuPG Key ID: 0xC33BD882 aim: beyondzero123 yahoo msg: beyondzero123
Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of THHGTTG. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it", it said, "and good luck." It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size of the Universe and ways of coping with that.
-THHGTTG