Verizon mail troubles

Thu Jan 29 22:01:20 UTC 2004

Personal Favorite:

We put a move order in with VZ for June 12, then rescheduled to July 12
(we were moving across the st.) of this year. On May 12 we come in and
discover that half our lines don't work. After 4 hours on the phone, it
turns out they took exactly half our lines (interestingly enough
1,3,5,7,etc.) and moved them across the street, and wired them into the
phone block for what was to be our neighbouring office. People calling
us got a furniture consulting firm half the time. It took me 5 days to
get all our lines back where they belonged, as when they moved them back
they decided to leave a couple there and then not acknowledge the
problem, only to move again finally in July and have them forget to move
a couple lines over.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Gerald
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 3:03 PM
To: Brian Wallingford
Cc: Andy Dills; Bob Snyder; nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Verizon mail troubles

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Brian Wallingford wrote:

> There's no question that there's a certain amount of social 
> engineering involved in contacting (or being allowed to contact) 
> competent folk.  It's advisable to be sure that any staff who will be 
> contacting them are fully versed in any services they will be 
> discussing.  The clueful staff at VZ are much more receptive and 
> accessible when they know in advance that they can expect to pick up a
likewise-clued individual.

My favorite (extreme sarcasm) lines I received from Verizon:

- (At 25 Bway with a T3 from the carrier room.) "The T3 outage you are
experiencing is not our problem." Turned out someone messed up a cable
in to their router in the carrier room. A tech that they dispatched to
25 Bway got access to the carrier room and recrimped the cables in to
THEIR equipment, not ours. Anyone who knows 25Bway knows you can't enter
the carrier room without a purpose. I can't go there and say let me work
on VZ equipment in the Carrier room.

- "I don't see the circuit ID for the T3 you just gave me in here do you
have another CID for it?"

- Random person in back office I had been transferred to,
"(definitively) It's not a problem on our system...What was that CID
again? Let me trace each leg of the Circuit. (pause) Oh wait, there is a
problem in the Central Office that that would affect that line" Me, "How
do I keep up with the progress of this ticket? Is there a ticket number
on that problem?" Him, "It's an internal ticket number. I can't give it
out."

- "If you are having intermittent problems, we can't do anything about
it.
We can test the line and if the T1 shows clean we will close the
ticket."

- Me, "The T1 CID $CID is down." Them, "What would you like us to do?"

- (From a T1 plagued with issues after 9/11. Paraphrased:) "Due to the
wiring in your building it would probably be best if we just ran a new
T1 out to you. You will need to sign a new 60 month contract and we will
work out the details of closing the old T1 once the new one is setup."
(This was a sales rep.)

- "Hi, I'm Chris L. I'm your new account manager. I will be your contact
with any problems you have." (Chris no longer answers his phone.
Neither does anyone else from the "Enterprise Services" dept here in
NYC.
None of the phone numbers Chris sent to me respond either.)

- The Trouble ticket line has given up any semblance of desire to help
Most companies answer "$Company_Name, This is $Name speaking, how may I
help you?" The TT line, "Verizon?!"

- T1 group, "I can loop the smart jack." Me on site, "The smart jack has
no lights." Them, "Oh, wait I was looping the wrong smart jack, what was
that CID again?"

- My favorite recording from the trouble ticket line: "We are
experiencing an unusually high call volume, please try your call again
later <CLICK>"

- One T1 outage last year: T1 tech says need to dispatch to site, Site
tech says no issue at smart jack need to get basement people in here
(don't remember the name right off), basement people say we can't hear
anything from C.O., C.O. tech says we can't hear anything from the
building. This outage took 5 days to recover from to get techs on site
and dispatched after each person pointed the finger at another person.

I could go on, but it is just depressing. I still have no one to
complain to if I can't get a hold of my sales rep or the T1 TT line
screws up royally.