A plague be upon your house, Verizon, ye who never stoppeth working for me. For in reality thou never stoppeth screwing me, in mine humble experience.

Yeah, enough with the Ye Olde English crap. I just wanted to fly into a rant about how much I blisteringly HATE Verizon Wireless and how I so utterly wish I could condemn them to a miserable death, gasping for oxygen as they drown in a bottomless pile of flaming manure. Their phones suck, their service sucks, their coverage sucks, and despite the fact that I actually usually get decent customer service from them, nothing ever gets done about my shit-tastic service and I get the distinct impression that I am losing my mind, because no one else ever seems to have these problems I have.

Even my parents have Verizon phones, and they don’t have problems with them when they come to visit this area. And even my cheesy $30 Verizon phone works great when I visit Detroit or Orlando. But here in Naples, the only place I can bloody well use this phone is in my office on the six floor of a huge building, where we’re elevated enough that the signal can actually get somewhere. At my house, in the car, at my wife’s workplace, at the mall, or ANYWHERE else in town, my signal strength is perpetually one bar, my calls get dropped every five minutes and half the time I can’t understand the person on the other end of the connection for all the dropouts and digital artifacting.

I’ve just had it, had it completely with this stuff. My wife and I both have the exact same cheeseball Motorola phone, and they both suck. Hers is even worse than mine, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. We recently called in and did the firmware update procedure, and my phone got a bit better, but Apple’s phone got way worse. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense! They’re the SAME MODEL PHONE!!

We had this same problem with our original Verizon contract. We had some middle-of-the-road Nokia phones back then. Signal quality, call drops, etc. were all just as bad. When the contract was up we decided to go back to Verizon and try new phones, figuring that would solve the problem. Oh yeah, the sales asshole talked up how much Nokia phones suck (what?) and that the fact they were Nokias was definitely why we were having problems. Yeah, okay. Anyway we were stupid idiots and signed another two-year contract, mostly because the competition at the time was also pretty poor (Cingular was still in its infancy and, from experience, I knew that signal coverage in our area was HORRIBLE, and all the other carriers were too expensive). Well, mister sales guy really suckered us because quality has been no better…if anything, worse.

I’m never owning a Verizon phone again. They are now on my shit list way down there with Sprint, who I would never even look sideways at again if not for the fact that you have to deal with them if you want to have a regular phone land-line in your house; there is no competition for them. Sprint’s a whole other rant, actually. In fact, we hate Sprint so much—even more than Verizon, because not only are they tax-and-overcharge happy, but they’re incompetent idiots as well—we would like to cancel our land-line altogether and use strictly cell phones at the house. But we CANNOT DO THAT because our Verizon phones don’t even work half the time, so you’d never be able to trust them to get a call through if you needed to make one. They have like a 60% call failure rate inside our home, and that’s not counting the fact that I can barely hear the people I’m talking to when the connection is supposedly clear.

Phone companies. Bah. In terms of corporate entities, I hate only insurance companies worse than phone companies. Insurance companies take all your money and give you shit about it any time you actually call upon them to perform the service you pay for. Phone companies take all your money and pretend to give you service, but if you ever have any problems, they will make you feel like you are on neuroleptics because obviously you’re the only person who can see that you have a problem. I swear to Christ, I take my Verizon phones with their shitty one-bar of signal strength to a Verizon shop for a tech to look at, and the fucking signal strength goes to three bars as soon as I walk in the damn store. It’s like a fucking conspiracy; like they have a mini cell tower in the back room or something so they can give the customers some excuse about their reception being fine. Verizon’s official policy, actually, is that if you have two bars of signal strength, you’re good, and they won’t do anything. Two bars is crap quality most of the time. It’s just like the POTS phone companies who, if you have DSL with them and you’re getting only 200k of the 1.5mb speed you paid for, will tell you that “anything over 128k is considered acceptable”, despite the fact that’s barely more than twice the speed of dialup. Then they hang up on you, and your Internet connection is shit and you have no recourse. Now that’s service!

Anyway, back to Verizon. I’m bound by contract with those assholes until August, meaning I have to sit here and use this stupid phone, yell “WHAT? WHAT?” into it whenever Apple calls me from work because I can’t hear her, call people back endlessly because the calls are always getting dropped, and essentially not get half of what I’m paying for. If I don’t like it, I can cancel now and pay like $300 in early termination fees, which is bullshit, so I’m going to just sit here for another six months and get screwed up the ass.

After the contract is up, Verizon is getting their butts cancelled into oblivion and I am never going to look back. Those fucktards have screwed me for the last time and if one of their smiley-faced salesmen ever even looks at me again, I’m going to jam this worthless, piece-of-shit Motorola into his goddamn ear canal and yell, “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW, SHITCOCK?!”

To replace these idiots, I’m considering Alltel or Cingular/AT&T. I’d prefer the former. I’ve heard some interesting things about the latter; namely, that they seem to have the reverse problem of Verizon. With Verizon, the service itself sucks, but the tech support is always quite friendly (if unhelpful) and to my knowledge the billing has never been inaccurate. Cingular, I hear, has good service quality in this area but are constantly mis-billing, overcharging and not doing anything about it for months even though you complain over and over. I’ve heard that same story from two different people in this office on two separate occasions, which is almost enough to take them out of the running entirely, since I have no patience for that kind of ineptitude either.

Alltel, on the other hand, I’ve heard no bad things about, plus the local AM radio station has partnered up with them. Usually when a local station partners with a cell phone company, it means that company has to be halfway decent in that local area, otherwise it wouldn’t really be in the station’s interest to encourage people to call them on that service. If my job at the radio station was to screen calls, and everyone who called on a particular cell phone service sounded garbled up and got dropped half the time, I doubt I would want to partner up with that service provider. Alltel’s coverage up north used to be pretty lousy which is why I never considered them much before, but now they seem to have better coverage areas.

What’s really unfortunate is that there’s no way to “test drive” a cell phone / cell service before you buy, at least not to my knowledge. In order for this stuff to be even remotely affordable, you typically have to sign a 1 or 2-year contract. So if you do that, and then go to your house and find you get no signal there at all, what can you do? You’re screwed!

Ah well. For now it’s status quo until August anyway, so why worry about it. Today’s rant has been concluded.