Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Two notes in one, on a theme

First part: If you need to reach me or my immediate household in the immediate future, don't try to reach us via our land line.  It's been cut off.

Second, and clarifying part:  Don't, if you can help it, get your telephone/internet/satellite tv service from Frontier.  They are, it seems, a bunch of incompetent pinheads.

The story goes something like this...

Last fall, Mom got a notice in the mail indicating that she was in arrears on her bill payment.  Now, under normal circumstances, this would have meant she just forgot to send a check, except that, for several years she has had her account paid directly via her credit card.  This she had not changed, and, indeed, there had been no trouble at all when, two years ago, she and Pop had thought they lost their credit cards on a vacation, and had been forced to replace the cards.  All records were changed immediately to the new numbers, and nobody had any complaints.

Still, a year and a half after my folks made the changeover to new cards, (so, there should have been no issue at all), Frontier suddenly stopped their automatic thingy, and didn't inform my parents that there had been a change of status for their account settings.  Naturally, not knowing that she was no longer automatically paying, she didn't actually send monthly checks.  After three months, Frontier sent a "delinquent" notice.

Mom called them, spent the entire afternoon being given the runaround -- on hold for 45 minutes at a time, shunted from one person to the next and back again to the first person, she thought she had managed to get everything straightened out.  At least, that's what the last person she spoke with told her.  And we didn't hear about anything more until two weeks ago, when she received another "delinquent" notice from Frontier.  She called them right away, and asked, in her politest tones,"WTF?"   The persons with whom she spoke eventually told her "everything is straightened out", and that she had a confirmation number, if anybody needed to check.

And then, this morning, we had no service.  No internet, no telephone.  Mom got out her cell phone (which she reserves primarily for when she travels), and called Frontier's offices again, to ask "WTF?????"

After having been put on hold five minutes, she hung up and called back.  She got a living, breathing, relatively competent individual who finally (!) informed her that, even though she had been given all sorts of go-aheads from the company, they couldn't actually enter the required information at their end, that Mom needed to enter all the relevant data online.  Which, of course, would require that she have an internet connection.  Which, of course, they had disconnected earlier today.

She managed to get the internet reconnected right away, whereupon she entered the relevant data regarding credit cards, etc.,  and got that up and running steadily while she does a little more in-depth homework on alternatives to Frontier.  Meanwhile, they've still not reconnected our house phone.  And, meanwhile, I'm learning precisely how extensive and creative Mom's gutter vocabulary is.

So, if you need to reach us, and you have either Mom's or my celly number, you can (maybe) connect with us that way, but, since we both have pay-as-you-go phones, we won't want to run up our tabs by talking for very long.  Otherwise, if you feel compelled to share something with anybody in this house, send us e-mails.

And, if you have service with Frontier, be aware that, for a communications company, they're actually quite poor at actual communication with their customers... and you might want to look for somebody else to carry your signals.

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