Several folks told us we had antiquated internet and streaming services; that Cambridge is no longer a Comcast-captive town; we should upgrade our package and pay less for more options. We made a spreadsheet of our respective costs, my housemate discussed what we wanted with a salesman in advance, and made an appointment at the Verizon store.
I showed up for our 3 p.m. appointment on time. A cheerful guy came up and said he’d be right with me, then went back to another customer. Dante’s first circle of hell is limbo, where I loitered as it became clear that the staff wait on people as they arrive. So why bother making appointments? More than fifteen minutes later, the salesperson attended to us. My doctor’s office is more punctual.
We had a list of the services we wanted. Combine our two phone lines to one account, add internet, MAX, Netflix and You Tube TV. The salesperson began with, “Let’s switch your accounts.” We paused. “First, we want a list of what this is going to cost.” “Oh, I can’t do that. You Tube TV is a separate platform and requires perk service.” “Do I buy it through Verizon?” “Yes, but I can’t give you that in an accounting.” “Why not?” “Because it’s a separate platform.” “So, can you give us the total cost, with the platform?” “No.”
This triggered the I-hate-to-shopper in me. I skipped right over the most enjoyable circles of hell: lust, gluttony, and greed, and dove straight into anger. “Don’t yell at me,” the salesperson said. “What do you want me to do? I ask for a monthly total of what this is going to cost and you tell me you can’t give it to me.” “I can give it to you, just not in a printout. I will have to add the YouTube TV by hand.” “Whatever.”
The salesperson jabbed his at tablet. This is one of those stores designed to be spare and uncomfortable. No real counters, no cash registers, just a quad of guys in black wandering with tablets. The lack of pen and paper make my nervous. Nothing feels solid.
“I’m having technical difficulties.” He kept poking. Finally, he disappeared and reappeared with a single piece of paper. The strangest price list I’d ever seen. The cost of Internet, with a discount applied. Blank space. The cost of my phone. An icon. The cost of my housemate’s phone. Turn over the second side. The cost of Max and Netflix. A credit for Loyalty 55+. A Bold cost of the next bill (including various start-up charges). Bold monthly cost.
Then the salesperson stated pointing at the sheet. “Ignore this $5. This $10 is for the YouTube Platform, then we subtract $15 from that. Add five dollars per month to the bold cost, and the $72.99 for YouTube TV service.
“Do you mind if I write on this?” “By all means, it’s yours.” I tried, unsuccessfully, to make notes of what he had said. Then I realized, all the line items were in my housemate’s name. We’d requested the service in my name. “We can’t do that because you have a metered service.” “Can I switch to an unlimited service?” Back and forth we went until, another bizarre price sheet later indicated that the same set of services in my name would cost $37 per month more than in my housemate’s name.
At this point I have descended beyond anger. Every word and printed figure illustrated circle six, heresy. Thus I arrived at the seventh circle of hell: violence. Fortunately for the salesguy, though I am a master of anger, I’m milquetoast at violence. Never hit a person in my life and besides, this guy’s just a pawn in corporately concocted confusion. We are not supposed to understand our internet bills, by design.
To save the mysterious $37, we agreed to put everything in my housemate’s name. I envisioned the hell that will ensue should he ever move, but the near-term result was good for me: after a few more password exchanges, I was free to go.
Since you’re always just one bike ride away from a good mood, I took a nice pedal along the river to cool my jets and rise out of Verizon hell. When I got home an hour later, I was surprised my housemate wasn’t there. Until I got a call from him. Still at Verizon where they needed me for another round of password exchanges. To what end I do not know.
Finally, after two and half hours in the store, my housemate returned, apparently all settled. We had a drink and shared our frustration until we could laugh about it.
The next day my housemate got a call from the salesguy. The discounts on his quote were wrong; our service will cost more than he described. I expressed no surprise. After all, the eighth circle of hell is: fraud.
The Awkward Pose 
Paul, I finally got tired of constantly-failing ATT internet hotspot and Direct TV service and signed up with Elon Musk’s out-of-this-world starlink service. To end the ATT service, I spent five hours on phone calls where they required passcodes I had never used before. For my (in)convenience, they sent these unnecessary passcodes to a phone number they assigned to my internet service but of course I could not access it since it’s not a real phone and even if they could leave a message on that number, I had no way to see it on the hotspot they knew they gave me that number for. They refused to tell me the account numbers that applied to my TV and internet service, and claimed they could not obtain it from the smart phone service I needed to keep, on which I was calling them for termination of the other accounts. After I spent hours of research to find the receipt I was given when I started the service five years earlier, I finally had the right information to satisfy the trolls posing this particular set of unnecessary questions so I could pass (Into the next ring of hell). The next reluctant troll took forever feeding the information into his off-and-on computer link (this is ATT so naturally you could not expect them to have working internal accounting computer link). By then it was 5 pm on the day of this task, and I feared they would say their computers had closed down for the day. Instead they said they had to wait until they received confirmation that the information they had entered to terminate my service had been received and confirmed. I asked why I needed to wait for them to confirm that. He repeated the last sentence. I said, “I have been wasting five hours on this and you said you will send me an email stating that my accounts have been closed, so why should I remain on the line while you wait for your computer to tell you it has received the information you gave it?” He repeated the line again, “they had to wait to receive confirmation that the information they had entered to terminate my service had been received and confirmed.” I said that was nonsense and hung up. To date, I have received neither the email nor the confirmation that my service has been cancelled. Let’s just hope…
Yikes! Makes me feel like we had it easy.