Good Lord!

For past week, my DSL Band width was similar to Boycott and Sunil Gavaskar both on nerves 90s playing for a draw, yes!, I am trying to define the height of slowness. I waited for 2 days, usually Verizon fixes it automatically, however it did not happen. I decided it was time call Verizon DSL support. I searched the bill that was close to an un-ruled 40 pages sugarcane composition notebook, you know what!, there was no support number on the bill . I called the regular billing number, which was closed. I then searched the telephone directory and finally called Verizon DSL support. Has anyone Called Verizon support recently? , Good Lord! The most irritating experience a human being could face.

7:45:00pm : A Vocodar voice says veriZon [ரொம்ப தேவை], then a sweet lady voice greets you , this is followed by her counterpart in “Para Espanola”.

7:45:20 pm : the voice says “I see that you are calling from xxx.xxx.xxx. phone number. The voice asks us to pick an item from the main menu. “We need to say it”, there were no number options. The main menu - “Billing Questions”, “set dosai”, “2 idlly 1 vada”, “IdiAppan paya”, “if you are vegetarian then say Thayier sadam”, “ if you are fat drink skim Milk” and finally “Technical support”. Using my hereditary Desi accent I say “technical suppert”, Sorry…I could not understand you – the menu options are “Billing Questions”, “set dosai” ,“2 idly 1 vada – Might be sold out by now”, “idiappam paya ”…etc, I swallow my tongue in order to get my “peter accent”, whew! This time it understood me. [120/90]. Then I heard the voice say “I am going to check your line”, and after a lot of minutes, it told me my connection was good. Yes! until now I was lying that my connection was slow. [140/110] .

7:50:01 as if the above was not enough, the stupid voice then gave a ridiculous suggestion. If you have problems with your DSL connection [Duh!] Please go to our website where you will find support material. Damn, MY DSL IS DOWN - the reason I am talking to this lousy robot is I CANNOT BROWSE THE INTERNET. How in the freaking world I can go online now and look for help? Maybe, they can add , “Please use your neighbors connection to check our website.” Adding insult to injury, it then lectures about the website, its URL, URI, their internal JDBC connection string, their programming methodology and every other detail that you hate to hear from anyone.

7:58, After all this nonsense, the voice announces outages in various location, most of them were on Planet mars, technically about 5 lights years away from my location and then innocently the voice queried to me – Do you really want to speak to an customer support Agent? I say @#@#$!!@!@#$ YES.

8:02, finally the robot transfers me to a Verizon Service center located either in India or some other eastern country.

8:06 A real female voice greets me enquires vital security information, they want to make sure it is me, I am forced to give details like கோம்பூர் ராமபத்திராச்சாரியரின் பேரனும், கோம்பூர் தேவராஜநின் புத்திரனும்மான SRIKANTH, Bharadwaja gotHram, utharada natchatiram etc., just to make sure its me.

8:10: Agent throws some pathetic technical questions at me: What is your modem model, Are you using the cable we gave you? Are you using a router, now let us shutdown everything and restart, I tell her I did this exercise about 10 times already. I am a network expert, there is fault in your line. But still she wanted me to do it, every electronic equipment and appliances in my house was refreshed.

8:23: After a complete reboot, nothing worked, she then told me that she is going to transfer to level 2 support.

8:25 to 9:00 – a stale big band music with a fretless bass and brass keeps looping on and one….

9:01 @##$##@%^&^$$ - It automatically hung up on me. [200/200]

9:05 Like Ambulimama satRum manam thaLaRatha Vikaramathithiyan, I called again, I did all the steps, finally got thru to the human agent and screamed at her what happened, she threw in multiple freebie apologies, and asked to me reboot, restart and do the same thing. Finally at around 10:00pm they told me they will be sending someone to check the lines today.

Ps: numbers in the [] are my blood pressure readings.