Wednesday, May 19, 2004

You can hear me now and you'll be hearing me for a long time to come

When we got DSL installed, Verizon talked me into a package of calling features for the phone because it was roughly the same as the few ala carte options I had on the phone. One of them was a 'distinctive ring' number, a second phone number on the same line that rang differently when someone called it.

Well, I promptly forgot the number and so we never gave it out. But, it rang non-stop none-the-less. The walk-up call-box at a nearby condo dialed it when you tried to gain admittance, the former number holder didn't pay his credit card bills and apparently I forgot to donotcall.gov it. So we'd just know that when it started ringing it wasn't for us. Sometimes we'd mess with the people at the condo but often time it was just annoying.

So I had called Verizon a few weeks ago and they tried to help me, but they assigned it to a line man who called me the next day, a Saturday, trying to figure out why he had been assigned. I told him about the condo and he said "Yeah, why'd they assign me? I'd just mess things up worse." But he said he'd swing by the condo place (I didn't know where it was, but he was able to look it up in the phone company records) and see if there was anyone who could fix it.

Apparently there wasn't, because the calls continued.

So I called Verizon the other night and said "Can you change my distinctive ring number? And can I not be charged for that?" and the operator said "Yes, and yes." She also checked to make sure that I was getting all the discounts I should be and then said it would be done within an hour. It was done 10 minutes later.

That's why Verizon rules.

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