Verizon Wireless needs a clue
So, back over the summer, my cell phone (a Motorola K1m “Krzr”) stopped being able to text – or do much else beyond making or receiving calls – while we were on vacation. It was a pain, but it still sorta worked, and we were on vacation, so whatever.
I went to a local Verizon store, they fiddled with it and got it working again by resetting it and updating the firmware. I wasn’t super excited about it – as usual, they can backup your address book but that’s it – but the phone worked again. Problem solved.
Closer to Halloween, the display in my phone started to act up. At first it was intermittent, but then the display in the outside of the flip only showed the Verizon logo. After a few days, the internal display just showed white – super useful. I brought it to the store again and they said that they couldn’t fix it, but I was eligible for a “new every two” replacement. Super – but what do I get?
Several folks at work pestered me to get a Blackberry of some sort, but I know myself, and I also know that our budget can’t handle an extra $60 a month just for me to have internet access every where I go. 
And since I usually have my laptop and some kind of Wifi connection, it seemed especially silly – so I looked at more reasonable replacement handsets. I stopped by the Verizon store a couple times to try out phones, and also kept visiting the Verizon website nearly daily in an effort to stay on top of what phones were available, and what new offers they had for replacement handsets. Mere days before Halloween, after being without the ability to text directly from my phone for a couple of weeks*, I made up my mind: a Motorola A455 “Rival”. What I like most is the QWERTY keyboard. (* It should be noted that with the aid of BitPim, I was able to backup not just my contacts, but also every photo, movie and sound on the phone, as well as see any text messages that came in so that I could call people from another phone to answer and let them know not to text me anymore. Very useful software, and it’s free!)
Fast forward to this week. Wednesday, as a matter of fact. I’ve had the phone for a while, and resolved when I first got it to take good care of it. I usually do a good job, but I had decided when I got it to not shove it in my pocket all the time, but rather to get a good belt clip for it. I’m a big guy, and the arms of my office char are probably a little closer than I realize, so I tend to be rather hard on the phone clips – I’ve been through more than I care to think about it since I started at my current job. On the plus side, I had been buying really inexpensive plastic clips, so it wasn’t costing me an arm and a leg – very good.
Shortly after I got the phone, I found a nice leather like case which has a magnetic clasp that holds the phone in – it does a great job. Between that and just being careful in general, I think I’ve taken pretty good care of this phone – it certainly hasn’t fallen down two stories of stairs, making me cringe with every step it hit.
In other words, I’m babying this thing. Which is why I’m so irritated that the display no longer works. At all. 
I was walking down the hall at work when I heard a text message come in. I pulled out the phone and hit a button to “wake” the phone up, only to find that the screen was white. Completely white. Crap. I put the phone back to sleep, then tried it again – still white. I wasn’t happy, and it wasn’t getting any better. I got back to my desk and decided to shutdown the phone, then try it again. I got color, so I thought it was working – until I looked closer. 
A bit more fiddling and I got the screen to work again. For a time. Remembering what had happened with the last phone, I decided to start purging the items that can’t be backed up: text messages. Photos and movies on the phone are on a flash card (love that feature, thank you very much). Verizon – or, possibly, the cell phone companies – in their infinite wisdom, have decided that they can only move the address book information from one phone to another.
Can anyone explain this? It’s 2010, right? Shouldn’t it be easy to transfer text messages and other information? At the very least, I would think it should at least be possible to do from one specific make/model to the same make/model. Transferring between different handsets, I can see, but from the one handset to the other that are essentially the same? That’s just dumb.
Why is it like this? The only thing I can think of is: money. If you have applications that you’ve paid for and downloaded, then they now have a chance to make you pay for it again. If it’s a song you downloaded, ditto. Movie? Same thing. Just about anything on the phone that’s not an address book entry, apparently, is worth something to them.
This kind of dumb ass corporate greed is probably what led us to the problems we had in the banking world recently. Idiots.
So I’ve created a new category: sh*tlist. In this case, I’m putting Verizon on the list. Like any company, they will do things that please me and make me cranky. Any company that gets on the list more than three times is very much likely to end up loosing me as a customer. Will I actually do this? Ask Cablevision – they’ll tell you they have no record of a customer with that name. There’s a reason for that (one, two, three.)
So Wednesday night, I managed to get to the local Verizon store – I had called their 800 from work. I was told, over the phone, that I should bring the phone into one of two specific stores, where they should have a tech who might be able to fix the phone. When I got to the store, the woman asked what was wrong, so I showed her and explained what I was told. “Did she have the phone in front of her?” was her sarcastic response.
I have to tell you that I almost completely lost my shit on her at this point. I’ve worked for a variety of company’s in my days, and I can tell you that seeing a pissed off customer and then trying to piss them off more? It never ends well. The only variable at that point was me – and rather than being hauled out of there in handcuffs for beating the poor, senseless woman with my phone, I took a deep breath and gritted my teeth so I could get the phone replaced. I was told I’d have it in two days. At work the next day I decided to turn off my handset – the ONLY display on my phone wasn’t working, so incoming calls had no caller id, and sending or receiving text messages is out of the question. It took a few tries, but I managed to dial the sequence to forward my calls to my work phone.
So imagine my surprise when I got home on Friday night and found that the replacement handset wasn’t there. I called them and finally got a person on the phone – apparently Friday night is a busy time in their call centers. I got the tracking number and was told that the handset should be in my hands by 7:00 pm on Monday night. Even if you ignore the weekend, as they are not “business days”, that’s still three days. Three days, not two. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have a work cell phone, and that it’s on the Verizon network, then I’d be even more cranky – no way to answer the phone, don’t you know.
Verizon, you’re on notice. Let’s see how this turns out.