AAAARGUUUUUGH!

I HATE verizon. First, it took us weeks to get our dsl to work, while we were getting charged for the service. Finally, after a horrible repeating scenario of me calling them and then nearly crying at their idiocy on the telephone, someone came and fixed what needed to be fixed and it worked. There have been a few blips since that required us to call and suffer through their terrible customer service people, but for the most part things have worked fine...until last night.

I went to school on Wednesday after having made a call with a phone that worked fine. When I returned in the evening, we no longer had a dial tone. We pay our phone bill every month. It may not always arrive perfectly on time, but it's only a day or two late at the most. So there is no reason that our phone shouldn't work right now. I didn't really care when I first discovered this problem, and kind of figured it might just magically work again. That hasn't been the case. Nate didn't have time to call them from work today, and I will be damned if either one of us is going to spend an hour with verizon on a cell phone being charged for every second we're on hold. I would stand outside rite aid on the pay phone before that happens! Anyway, so I tried to report it online tonight...didn't go very well. They did some sort of "line test" that had inconclusive results and said we would have to pay for someone to come fix the problem. I don't think so. So I tried changing some answer about an NID panel to see if that would change things. Then the website says we should check our NID box. Well, you know, that's a locked box the entire complex uses that we would need a ten foot ladder to reach that it's probably illegal for us to be poking around in. Basically, I'm pretty furious. I don't know anyone that is going to just go poking around in their NID box. I lived in my parents' current house for about 9 years and have never seen the NID box. ARGH!

You know what else is really stupid-our dsl works. Here's another stupid thing while I'm talking about stupid...comcast had inexplicably started charging us 50 bucks for their digital cable. Think again people, we don't subscribe to that! I wrote something to that effect on the bill slip that you send in with the check and did not give them the 50 bucks...I am feeling every bit the battered consumer at the moment. I wish there was a little competition in this area other than like Cavalier telephone and a satellite dish. If we did get a satellite dish I'm sure it would never ever work and then we wouldn't be able to return it and would end up using it as a birdbath while we washed dishes at a roadside diner to pay for it.