Verizon Customer Service

This post was supposed to be about Canada, and the title of the post was going to be O, Canada. I’m in Victoria, in British Columbia. The company I work for (Perforce) has an office in Victoria and I’ve been working long-distance with the people here for the last nine months or so. I’ve been thinking about making a temporary move here, and today I met with Jason, the guy who runs the Victoria office, and we set a date. June 1. I’ll be staying for four to six months to start, and who knows, I may wind up staying longer or even permanently.

So I’m all excited about this, and also pretty nervous. That’s what this post was going to be about. I was going to start with my excitement and nervousness, and segue into some pithy stories about my interactions with Canadians. I was going to illustrate the post with a photo I took from my hotel window of the British Columbia capital building, all lit up like a Christmas tree. I took the photo on my cell phone, and it looks pretty good on the tiny cell phone screen.

But then I tried to send the photo to myself, at my email address, so I could post it to Salt in Wound. But it wouldn’t send; all I could get was a message that says something like “Photo transmission failed”. So I called Verizon customer service, and they were tenacious about trying to fix the problem to the point where it was almost ridiculous. The first woman I talked to had me punch in all sorts of secret codes (hint: if you press “Menu”, then “0”, and then “000000” you get a scary-looking Service Menu with all sorts of things in it that I don’t want to go near). She talked me through that, and that didn’t fix the problem, then she talked me through some other things, none of which worked. So then she transferred me to someone else with more expertise than her. After more than half an hour the new guy was still trying to talk me through possible fixes, to the point where I finally said, uh, look, this is great of you and all, but this isn’t that important and tomorrow I can just get a SIM card and transfer the picture that way.

Oh – did I mention that they couldn’t talk to me on my cell phone while I was trying these fixes, so they called me on the hotel phone at their own expense?

The point is: isn’t Verizon customer service great? That’s why this post is illustrated with Verizon’s logo, and why this post is about them, and not about Canada.