disconnecting is hard to do

[scottielvr]

Okay, so I’m moving and I need to disconnect my telephone "land line". I require no new products or services. I wish only to disconnect my service.That’s it. I don’t want new phone service. I don’t want their cell phone service. I don’t want their internet service. I just want my phone disconnected.

You can’t do that online, and there’s no option in the automated menu for disconnect requests, so you get shunted around a lot. I called Verizon last week and spent 50 minutes bouncing around between on-hold session. Hung up. Trying again today.

So far I've been on hold for 44 minutes, and I don't want to hang up again and lose my place in the queue--though I don't even know if there is a queue, maybe they're just torturing me for their amusement, and there’s no end in... well, sound.

I have the phone on speaker while the on-hold program cycles through ads: yes, you’re forced to let them advertise at you while you wait to be allowed to beg them to disconnect your service.

I get to listen to: 1) A querulous woman sending her son pictures of last night’s meatloaf; 2) a doofy guy announcing that golf is not a sport; and 3) an over-the-top ad for the John Adams HBO mini-series, interspersed with lite-jazz-muzak. Again, and again, and again.

--And the worst, the absolutely maddening part, the one that makes you yearn to send a monstrous electrical pulse back thousands of miles over the lines to their servers and fry ‘em all, is when the smooth and smarmy digitized voice murmurs, oozing sincere concern, that “we realize your time is important.” For the 20th time.

Kill me.

That is all.

[emmline]

I have experienced similar.
Most likely we all have.
If you have not succeeded yet, my next approach would be to send them, asap, a witty but scathing letter explaining what you went through with their button-pushing bs, exactly when you attempted to cancel and ceased to use their services (which they should be able to verify,) and demand that any further billing not date beyond that moment.
Better yet, mail it and fax it. And submit an online form.

[The Weekenders]

You could be trying to disconnect aol, fwiw.

[scottielvr]

Yeah, I know it's the way of things nowadays... Just venting. The ads kick it up a notch it from simply annoying to infuriating.

One shudders to think what trying to cancel AOL must be like now...Ack.

P.S. I hung up at 56 minutes, called the billing office (they answer the phone there, natch), and got them to tell me the bidness hours of the office that handles the disconnect orders, so I can try calling them first thing. A pox on 'em. I never did get shunted to an overseas call center, at least. Um, should I be grateful for that?

[djm]

As I read your thread I am being deluged with supersweet muzak from our ISIT Help Desk. The music is interspersed with messages of how important my call is, and that typical call response is 12 minutes ... hmm, that was half an hour ago.

djm

[Doug_Tipple]

You might inquire whether your new telephone provider will cancel service from your last provider. If I recall correctly, that is how I changed from one provider to another.

I remember not too many years ago that when I called customer service for my home telephone I reached a person in my home town. My dad, who was born in 1914, never got over the fact that when he called for telephone service he often reached someone in a city a thousand miles away. "How would they know what was going on in Winchester", he would ask. And, of course, the correct answer is that they don't know very much. They are just answering calls in a national call center, and they are thinking about what they have to do when they get off work.

[CHasR]

Oh, Verizon !!!!!

I paid for an entire year of my biz ad in the phone book,
only to find out it had never , actually, run. They did place the ad in several other books, but the damage was done.

When I decided to run an ad again, they said they couldnt print it because my phone number was serviced by another provider, and if I wanted my number in the yellow pages, I'd have to switch to Verizon in order to do so.

So I called the other provider , and they told me this was ILLEGAL.
Verizon disagreed.

This went back and forth several months until Verizon finally capitulated.

Moving? Yeah, I did that too: Ended up having to personally contact two CWA workers to get the job done in my new residence. Verizon kept sending hirelings who didnt know how to install a 2 line residential system.

Previous residence: more of the same (this is 9 years ago) Eventually, I got lucky, the 3rd (or 4th, I forget) guy just felt so sorry for us, that he finally did what he had to , to get us the service we wanted. He probably lost his job, though.

Whenever I see a Verizon truck pull up on my street, I figure someone somewhere will lose their phone connection. It's that bad; and they just keep promising, promising, promising pie-in-the-sky service.
Verizon yeech.

[Innocent Bystander]

So, are they some relation to TalkTalk in the Uk?

[emmline]

Yes, they can cancel your existing service for you.
MCI did that for me without being asked!
I'd joined Working Assets for long distance service, had not yet disengaged from MCI for basic service, and MCI decided, with no prompt from me, to cancel Working Assets and name themselves my long-distance provider.

They also did things like double-bill. I did have to resort to a letter writing campaign to finally unload them. Then I had to put sticky notes up around the house, just in case husband (who is memory-impaired) happened to answer the phone when MCI called to try to convince us to come back. The sticky notes said "NO TO MCI!" It made an impression, and he'd say "no to MCI!" at me every so often just for the fun of it.

I have Verizon for basic service because it was the only remaining choice. Actually, now I could do it through Comcast on cable.

The girls are clamoring for a switch from AT&T to Verizon for mobile service because in the backwater where their college is located Verizon gets service and AT&T barely gets a bar...and only on your lucky day.
AT&T doesn't work in our house worth a stink either.

[djm]

I love hearing Americans complain about their phone service. I know some techs who went south on contract to work on some cables (I think it was Ameritech). They were supposed to be helping out in a big service crunch, but instead of new service, they spent all their time doing about ten years worth of repairs on existing cables, correcting incorrect or lost splices, and restoring air pressure.

Yes, it's bad, but look how much you are saving on long distance calls, which is what started the mad rush in the first place. It is getting worse here, but not as bad as some of the horror stories I hear daily from the US.

djm

[Bloomfield]

For a moment there I thought you were going to kick the chiffboard habit, or email, or something like that. Phone co's in America generally suck.

[Ronbo]

For a moment there I thought you were going to kick the chiffboard habit, or email, or something like that. Phone co's in America generally suck.

Now that AT&T has bought back Bellsouth and a bunch of other systems, I am waiting for the old, black dial telephone to show up at the door, and charges to start rising dramatically. For what seems to be a pretty good VOIP, check out www.magicjack.com. For forty bucks you get a usb dongle that you can use on any computer with high speed internet, and one year of free calls to the US and canada. Bought a cheapie flip phone, and used that to hook up to the computer. Even gets relatively good sound quality in hotels and internet hotspots, although some of the lower rated wireless speeds can cause an occasional hiccup. One small way to kick the big phone guys in the shin.

[sbfluter]

The phone company used to be a trustworthy agency before they deregulated it. Now look what we have. What a mess!

Don't get me started on MCI. They are the most evil, vile company on the face of the earth.

[rebl_rn]

You know, our gas company has this deal when you call them, if it's going to be a wait, they call YOU back when they are free. You'd think the phone company could do that, but no.

I was on hold over 4 hours trying to disconnect my phone (I had already given up a couple of other times with long hold waits and this time I was determined not to give up. Thank God I had a speaker phone.

At first I was going to keep the same company, but I switched after that experience.

[tansy]

I went through that a few months ago with ATT - Bellsouth, it was rough but we made it. Now we have Net 10 prepaid, always $.10 a minuet, no bills, no hassel. FOR internet I do wireless hotspots and my marina has wifi included. Just try and cancel a Discovery card, it took 2 years and I was starting to have dark insect thoughts before we made it out of that one.
It is like coming out of a long illness and they are forever on my banned-sh!t list.
I wrote them on paper and throughly let them know the severity of my feelings for them, I even got an apology from them which I sent back with rejected written over it.
It is so fine to be free from that scum!