By Livia Bergovoy…

The weirdest thing happened today. Verizon customer service explained that they are obliged to send me, free of charge, an upgrade – as in faster – DSL modem . This information came as a great surprise. You see, I’ve been getting my mind around and working toward extricating myself from Verizon’s clutches because I’ve become increasingly miffed by their cavalier customer service – particularly Verizon’s Wireless entity, Verizon Mobile. So, as I said, I’ve been not-so-methodically and slowly arranging to use other companies to provide phone service. It has taken quite a long time to enact this transition. Indeed, now I may not entirely pull the plug on all Verizon services.

You may wonder what it is that is making it so complicated to extract myself. Here is some of it: A while back – in the interest of doing the right thing, i.e., going green – I went paperless with Verizon. A little later, in the interest of convenience (boy! was I wrong) I combined my three Verizon services into one paperless bill. Every month I got an email saying it was time to pay for the three services. As long as my bill was the same amount from month to month it got paid. If the amount was different, I wanted to review the charges. It was impossible to decipher the charges. (Verizon really ought to get their website in order.) So I had to talk to customer support because Verizon’s on line customer service is so confused…

Well I could go on and on… But let’s cut to the chase. The Verizon land line customer service person took care of all my requests and informed me that I am due a free faster modem for my DSL service. And that he would have it sent to me free of charge. He said that the modem was due to me because I just asked him to split the billing between my land and my wireless line. Don’t ask! Now it’s two days later. I got the new high speed modem and let me tell you – it is ever so zippy. And, though more testing is necessary, it seems that my wireless service is actually working in my house now. Unbelieveable.