The World's Common Tater

The plan for my return to regular blogging was to do my delayed June in books post today and then a post about my trip tomorrow. That will be pushed back a day so I can write about my experience with Fios support.

As I posted before, I returned home from my trip to find a partial power outage in my house. i was able to restore the power immediately but noticed my Internet was still down. I restarted the router and it was still down. I checked the V and my TV service was also gone as was the landline that is part of the bundle. I knew that the backup battery for the phone has been dying before we left and the battery unit showed no power, so I thought maybe that was the problem. I talked to support people on Twitter and from that and things I had read before I was given the impression that a dead battery on the old ONT’s like I had could disrupt service. So, I ordered a battery via Prime. The only problem there was that I could only get next day delivery to where m kids live. My house would take several days for some reason. So, I had the battery shipped to my daughter’s apartment and drove down to pick it up when it arrived. I changed the battery and the service was still dead. I called and talked to Verizon and was told that the battery would not be the issue so I asked them to schedule a technician to come to look at it. Surprisingly, they said someone could come on the 4th of July and I was given an 11-3 window. I was asked on the call to confirm that no one had Covid symptoms or was in quarantine and that we would wear masks if no vaccinated. I confirmed and we were booked.

Sunday morning I got a text asking me to once again confirm the Covid stuff. I confirmed they would arrive between 11-3. Around 2:45 I received a text asking me to once again confirm the Covid stuff and then the technician would be on his way. There was no confirmation of same on their end. The technician finally arrived, but past the window I was given. He was good, though, and has us up and running in no time at all. The one thing I forgot to check was the phone since I rarely use it. I happened to notice after he was gone that the phone still had an error so I called Fios to ask if they could check the phone status. I did mention during the call that based on the message that the issue could be our phone, not the line. The support person ran a test and asked me to try the phone. No dice. She asked if I had another phone on he house I could use to test if it was the phone. I said no. She then said she ran the test again and somehow suddenly saw that there was a problem with the in-home wiring. This is after several support people and an on site technician did not see this over two days. She said it would cost $99 to fix it but what I should really do is sign up for a $15 a month service that would exempt me from charges if we had a wiring issue. I asked how it was that no one, including the technician found this issue. She just kept repeating the price telling me the phone would not work until I paid it. It sounded like extortion to me. I asked to speak to a supervisor. She said the supervisor would have to call me back.

While waiting for the call remembered that we actually had an old, Coca Cola phone plugged into the basement phone jack. I called the home number and it rang through. I used the phone to call my cell phone. it worked. I brought the phone upstairs and plugged it into that jack. It all worked again. There was no issue with my phone line. Apparently, all the power issues with the storms killed my phone. The line worked fine. She had tried to charge me a fee because my physical, landline phone had died. Then the supervisor called me back on the landline number that they claimed wouldn’t work unless I paid them. He didn’t seem too concerned with the fact that the support person had possibly liked to me to get me to sign up for a new service or the fact that he was talking to me on the line that she said wouldn’t work until they fixed my wiring issue.

Today I will be talking to someone else at Verizon and won’t stop until they give me an apology discount or at least a free move channel for my troubles. They owe me something. I pay way too much for my services to be treated this way.