Is it just me, or is every single phone company in the world a huge pain to deal with?
A few months ago I had a Frontier phone number ported over to Packet8’s VoIP service. Everything went perfectly. Almost. Since then, anyone in the world who is using any carrier other than Frontier gets routed to my VoIP phone when they dial the ported number. But if you’re using a Frontier telephone and you dial that number, you still ring through to the old land line.
It gets better. That land line shouldn’t even have a dial tone on it anymore, yet it does. I can even make outgoing phone calls with it. I haven’t been billed by Frontier since March, and yet I have a fully functioning phone connected to their service.
But since I want Frontier customers to be able to call me, I decided to call Frontier and point out to them that their switches are still routing calls for a number that doesn’t belong to them anymore to a phone line that does, when all the rest of the world - Verizon, Ameritech, Sprint, Pacific Bell, whomever - gets it right. On the first call I made the mistake of calling customer service who, if you start talking about switches and other things technical, get confused and flustered. Their stance was that since it’s Packet8’s phone number, it’s Packet8’s problem. Apparently the striking coincidence that the only people in the world who cannot call me are Frontier’s own customers was beyond their ability to comprehend.
2nd phone call, I ask to speak to repair. I explain the issue all over again, and repair tells me that they cannot open a trouble ticket to fix the problem because I am not their customer. Brilliant. I told her that if Waste Management were dumping trash on my front lawn, I would call them to ask them to stop even if I weren’t their customer, because no one else could fix the problem but them. I am a Waste Management customer, but that’s beside the point. She didn’t get the analogy at all. So I told her, “My point is this: If I’m not your customer - great. Stop routing phone calls to my Frontier phone line, then.” This did not make her happy, but I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere further anyways, so it was worth it.
On the 3rd call I got someone in customer service who actually sounded like he understood the issue and wanted to help me, but he put me on hold and I accidentally pulled the phone cord out of the wall when I tried to get something out of the fridge. Dammit.
Oh yeah, at this point I’m using their own “disconnected” phone line to call them, just for the irony of it.
It isn’t until the 4th call that I finally get sent to someone in repair who actually has a couple of brain cells to rub together, fully gets the issue and can see it’s obviously Frontier’s switches that are to blame, and says she’ll open a trouble ticket and everything should be sorted out by Thursday at the latest. Funny that she was able to open a ticket when the woman I spoke to on my 2nd call told me it was impossible, since I’m not their customer.
It occurred to me during this 4th call that here I was putting up with all kinds of flack from Frontier and jumping through all kinds of hoops just to convince them that they probably shouldn’t be giving me free phone service anymore.
I’m not really sure why.
Bill,
You should have just let a sleeping dog lay. Any chance you can get one over on the corporate world you should take it :=)
Will
Will
May 29th, 2007