I hate Verizon with a burning passion hotter than a thousand fiery suns. It’s probably a good thing that they are no longer BBN’s parent company, otherwise I couldn’t rant about their complete and utter failure and incompetence when it comes to the handling of my DSL physical line.
So, I am still having problems, which I have thoroughly documented in previous posts. In fact, I am still having the exact same problem I have had since before my install was officially completed: excessive capacitance tip-to-ring, which causes the modem to lose sync and my computer to (obviously) lose the connection.
This past Saturday, I opened yet another trouble ticket with Speakeasy. I always have to go through them, because I don’t have a customer number with Covad, who in turn has to contact Verizon. As far as Verizon knows, I am merely “end user”, and as far as Covad knows, I am just an account number. I think this is part of the problem: the people I need to talk to are two degrees of customer service separation away from me.
Two weeks ago I opened a trouble ticket, but Speakeasy just wanted me to get back to them if the problem recurred. Unfortunately my ticket was “resolved” after two days, since I didn’t get back to them because I didn’t lose my connection in that time. The modem started failing again a few days later. For all I know, it fails overnight all the time, but I’m not going to stay up all night just to see if it gets the green blinkies.
Anyway, I got this current ticket escalated with Covad, and an ILEC technician (that would be a Verizon guy) actually came out to my building today and did “some tests” at the NID, aka the phone box. Naturally, he found nothing wrong, at which point Verizon closed Covad’s service ticket on my behalf. I am pretty sure that this is at least the second, if not the third time that a Verizon tech has come to my building, done something, and determined that nothing was wrong.
It seems that Verizon does not understand the definition of the word “intermittent”. As in, sometimes there’s a problem, but most of the time it’s just fine. I am worried that I’m going to end up in some sort of boy-who-cried-wolf situation; I can certainly understand why Verizon wouldn’t want to keep sending techs to the same address when as far as they’re concerned there’s nothing wrong.
Incidentally, a misspelling (why is that word so hard to spell?) of “intermittent” led to Dan and I having a conversation about an inter-mitten protocol. The physical layer would be yarn.
Sam at Speakeasy has called me back now that my LJ rant is nearly complete. For the second time, both Speakeasy and Covad have performed loop tests that reveal the problem. This is at least the fourth time that Speakeasy has performed such tests. Every time, they get the correct (that is, the problem is detected) results, but apparently every time Verizon tests the line, it’s fine. Magical.
At least Speakeasy has good hold music, mostly assorted alternative and classic rock, with a few weird ones thrown in. World, I guess. Sam reported that he got to listen to Kenny G while sitting on hold with Covad. Sam, whoever you are, thanks for taking that bullet.
Unfortunately, Covad was either unable or unwilling to escalate my ticket further. I can’t whine to them directly, so I just have to hope that the Speakeasy customer service guys are being appropriately obnoxious. By tomorrow night I will hopefully know when Verizon has scheduled another service call, which of course won’t be able to happen until Monday.
So. Much. Hatred.
