Frontiers of Absurdity

So today officially marks the "end" of our move into the new apartment, as we'll be doing the "move-out walkthrough" with the landlord tomorrow afternoon. Moving is Hell, and I'm loathe to do it again anytime soon, now realizing just how much stuff Jen and I have accumulated. But the move itself wasn't all that bad. It was tough, and physically defeating, but the effects are so emotionally uplifting as to easily cancel out the physical pains involved.

Last week began Jen's and my first real involvement with Frontier Telephone. This is Rochester's only real copper telephone service provider. There are other small outfits in the city, but none can service us here in Scottsville. Our main beef with our setup until now was actually the subject of a previous post: VoiceOverIP Telephone, or "digital phone" offered through cable lines instead of traditional telephone copper lines. The service plan itself was robust to say the least... but so was its price, at a steep $40. The provider, Time Warner Communications, offers only that plan and no other - not even one without long distance services. It's $40/mo (plus fees!) or nothin' with them. So we decided to try Frontier, hoping for a lower cost -- the one and only thing they DID deliver.

Last Friday, they came and "installed" our phone line, which was no more complicated than connecting a few wires outside. But the installer never told us, or left any kind of note... so we woke up saying "wasn't Frontier supposed to have been here to install the phone??" At the other house, I was able to get a human on the phone after only about five minutes, and was informed that "Company Policy" does not permit service technicians to enter the home to verify the wiring correctness. So they hook you up to their network, but don't make sure things are working beyond that point, within your walls. The snooty woman asked me "did you try plugging a phone in?" and when I told her that I had not, she laughed and suggested I "go do that." And so I did, pissed and fuming, only to discover to my dismay (but no surprise) that the line WAS in fact active and connected (there's a "click" on the phone, and phones with lighted buttons will light up), but there was no dialtone. So, with a cloud over my head and fumes in my gas tank, I drove BACK to the other place and called Frontier again. This time, we found an even snootier "representative" that informed us they'd be happy to come out and check out the line, but that it would be about a week. I told them about school starting soon, and needing to use RIT's dialup (through the phone line that doesn't work yet) because Time Warner wouldn't be out to install our cable modem until the 10th of September... another WONDERFUL topic on our plate as well. They said they'd "expedite" the service call, but could not in any way get the tech that had JUST visited us to come back that day. No way, no how. Customer is WRONG! FUCK YOU CUSTOMER!

*ahem* -- I'm a little upset.

See, I went home, and spent the next two hours madly tearing apart the wallplates and boxes in the apartment (I spent time tooling around with my parents' house wiring as a kid, so I did my fifteen-minute telephone-repairman's course a decade ago. ::dry laugh::). Only on the LAST ONE that I tore apart did I find a shiny piece of foil jammed into the socket... happily shorting out the phone line. I removed it, plugged in a phone, and poof - it worked.

Congratulations to me, right? Right. So now the line is working, and the service tech never showed up the next day afterall. I eventually called and found out they'd just not gotten to it on their route that day. I thanked them as *ahem* politely as possible.

Jen is the billing contact for the Frontier account, and thus had to be the one that talked to these assholes on the phone at first. They wouldn't even speak with me, regardless of her presence or approval, until the problem had escalated and Jen was simply unwilling to start a pissing match with the people on the phone. They repeatedly put her on hold, an aggregate of over half an hour, while she was trying to do absolutely nothing more complicated than changing our plan from the "basic" package to the "nothing" package plus caller ID. The basic is $30 a month. We're now at $25. Whoopee! But it took a miserable half-hour of being bounced around their phone system to achieve this. When they asked why we were changing plans, she told them plainly "we are disgusted with Frontier's service and behavior, and appalled at the terrible attitudes of the phone service people." They thanked her, and hung up. Still no call from a supervisor or customer relations person asking for more details or even doing a followup. Nothing. Again, fuck you customer!

Now, the final blow. And this one's a good one. The other day, I tried to call my friend Barry, who has a Verizon cellphone.

Cellphones suck because their numbers have NOTHING to do with the location (even generally) of their owners. Barry's phone, for instance, has a number based in WEBSTER, NY, which is about an hour's drive northeast of here. And, as the very happy people at Frontier informed us, because we have a Scottsville 889 number, we are subject to the "smallest standard calling area of any Rochester-area exchange." Direct quote. What does it cost to extend that area to all "rochester exchanges" ? An extra 8 bucks.

So since we don't have that $8 add-on, we cannot call our friend about a mile away because he has a cellphone with a number based forty miles away. The reason we physically CAN'T call Barry, though, is that Frontier discontinued our longdistance service without telling us! We called (Jen called) to find out why, and they said that her service had been "minimized" until she faxed in NOTARIZED copies of her Drivers license and SS card, etc. Nobody thought to mention this to her when she asked them to come and start service for us - no "you're going to have to send this in for long distance service to continue working" - and that's the thing, it's not like it never worked... it worked for a few days, and then poof, nothing.

The best part of it all is that even if we DO send in her ID and get them to enable "long distance" services again, we STILL can't call Barry without it being a long distance call... at 17 CENTS PER MINUTE... unless we spend the $8 a month to extend our calling area.

WHY in God's name must so much putrid excrement be involved in starting up phone service for the first time? I'm as disgusted with Frontier's performance as I expected to be, based on my brief dealings with them for DSL service over 3 years ago. I was f*cking pissed off then, and I'm f*cking pissed off now, and God help me, if I had a choice, I'd go elsewhere.

So we're sticking with the $25 a month plan, and we're going to scout out some cheap-o phone cards for all the "long distance" calling we may have to do. *Gasp* I hope they don't go making RIT long distance... it's like 8 miles down the road - that's far!!

PS. Frontier Telephone is the same company offering DSL+Satellite services joined together to compete with Time Warner's "All In One" package which brings Internet, Telephone & TV into one service provider and one bill. Time Warner's plan is monthly, and can be cancelled at any time. Frontier, whose DSL service performs AT BEST at 66% the speed of cable and whose Satellite services suck horribly during bad weather, requires a two YEAR contract. Termination fees are approximately $200. Congratulations, Frontier, you've mastered the art of raping your customers and making the less wary of them THINK they're getting a good deal while you're at it.