{"id":54,"date":"2004-05-28T22:50:18","date_gmt":"2004-05-29T05:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=54"},"modified":"2012-11-16T10:50:57","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T18:50:57","slug":"verizon-witless-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/05\/28\/verizon-witless-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Verizon Witless (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two weeks of arguing with Verizon over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/05\/16\/verizon-witless\/\" class=\"unemphasized\">their early termination fee<\/a> hasn&#8217;t gotten me anywhere.  They refuse to waive it. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It follows the terms of your contract, so it&#8217;s a valid charge,&#8221; they say.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s not valid; I&#8217;m saying it&#8217;s not <em>right<\/em>.  So you&#8217;d rather have $175 from me now than have me <em>ever<\/em> do business with you again?  You are aware I&#8217;ve paid Verizon over $800 during the past two years and used barely any of my minutes, right?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a valid charge.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It seems that more and more people these days are drones who can&#8217;t think for themselves and who are unwilling to stick their necks out.<\/p>\n<p>Verizon did indicate, however, that I could get the fee waived if I reactivated my old account for the remaining duration of my contract with no additional commitment.  The catch?  To reactivate my old account, they&#8217;d need to use my original cell phone number, which I already had ported to Sprint.  Of course, it&#8217;d be too easy if they just let me pay them directly for my remaining two weeks, as I had offered originally.  No, their highly advanced computer system required an active account with the original number.<\/p>\n<p>I relented and decided to play their stupid game.  Not wanting to get an early termination fee on my Sprint account too, I figured I could change my Sprint number, free up my original, and then reactivate my Verizon account.<\/p>\n<p>After I changed my Sprint number, Verizon informed me that although my original number was now available, it was Sprint&#8217;s property and that Verizon couldn&#8217;t touch it.  To transfer it back to Verizon, they said, I&#8217;d need to have a Sprint account using it.  Unyielding computer systems win again over common sense.<\/p>\n<p>To add insult to injury, Sprint won&#8217;t even let me have my original number back.  (Another victory for the computers.)  So now I have Verizon&#8217;s $175 charge, <em>and<\/em> I&#8217;ve lost my original, four-year old number for nothing. (Not that anyone calls me anyway.) Had I not ported my number in the first place, I probably could have reactivated my Verizon account and had that fee waived.  Who knew number portability would bite me in the ass like this?<\/p>\n<p>And did I mention that the Sprint phone was a gift?<\/p>\n<p>I give up.  I suppose I&#8217;ll pay the stupid fee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two weeks of arguing with Verizon over their early termination fee hasn&#8217;t gotten me anywhere. They refuse to waive it. &#8220;It follows the terms of your contract, so it&#8217;s a valid charge,&#8221; they say. &#8220;I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s not valid; I&#8217;m saying it&#8217;s not right. So you&#8217;d rather have $175 from me now than have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-rantsraves","tag-phones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}