Remember the old Lily Tomlin skit where she is portraying a phone company employee, and ends with, we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company? It's pretty much alive and still kicking in 2023. They can't be bothered with such niceties as accurate information. And why should they? Who's gonna "make" them?
My tale of woe with the behemoth known as Verizon started with their offering of ADSL, way back in the day around when their downstream offering was (IIRC) 640 kbits down and 90 kbits up. I had what amounted to two accounts with them, one ostensibly dedicated to voice and the other for data (pre-DSL, for anything between V.32 and V.90 modems). As I recall, they basically had to be ordered separately, because the one line was ready as soon as I moved in, but the second had to be physically connected. In order to consolidate that from two phone line bills into one though, it required a ridiculously priced "records order change," something on the order of $40, or a little more than one month's bottom line charges (about $35) for one of the two lines. Like many utility companies at the time, and today, they offered automatic payment. Not wanting at the time to have yet another bill to worry about paying, I said sure, fine, do that, and gave them checking account information for both accounts.
One fine day, Verizon started offering G.DMT ADSL, with no cost penalties for moving (within their territory), and a discount for ordering a self-install kit online. To quote They Might Be Giants, on "Apollo 18," that's when all my troubles began. As the first line, available at move-in, was on pair one of the RJ14 jack, and the later installed line for data (both modems and DSL) was on pair two, I'm guessing the geniuses at Verizon figured that I was incapable of wiring up something from pair 2 on one plug to pair 1 on another jack, so they scheduled, without my consent or notice, a premesis visit (a.k.a in the industry as a truck roll). And then when I was not around (at my job) for them to do any work, they attempted to charge me a missed premesis visit charge of, IIRC, $70. When I saw my bill for over $100 instead of my expected $35, I of course called them up and said, in essence, what part of self install did you not understand? There was no reason you should have dispatched anyone to my apartment.
They were quite concilliatory, saying you're right, you should not have been charged that. But here's the thing: they immediately lost my trust and, for me, the future privilege of directly debiting my account when they took the full amount of the bill out of my account anyway. Instead, they chose to have an account credit balance. So let's see if I have this straight: you admit you should not have been entitled to my money, yet a few days later, you take it anyway, and hold onto it, instead of putting it back. Granted, you did not charge my account for THAT phone line for the next two months, because I had a credit balance. You also told me it was impossible to apply that money to my "voice" line, despite billing the exact same name at the exact same address. And you continued to charge me the $35 or so for that other line. Mmmmm hmmmm...OKey dokey.
Next, a couple of years later, after a couple rounds of speed upgrades, where Verzon was giving me 1.5Mbits down and 384kbits up service, they gave me a choice: if you wanted to enter into a renewed contract, your billed amount will remain basically the same. But if instead you wanted to go with our month-to-month policy, we want an additional $8 per month for the privilege. OK, seeing no reason, no particular additional value at the time for being month-to-month, I said, sure, sign me up for another year. Then, mysteriously, thousands of additional feet of wire got added to my loop...overnight! I kinda had a Dorothy Gale experience, my apartment building magically travelled something like 4000 more feet away from their CO. Suddenly, according to them, my loop was not capable of (reliably) carrying better than 768kbits/sec down, or half the down, nor more than 128k, or one third, up. A few different phone calls to them promised to restore my service to the previous 1.5M/384k, each time claiming I had to wait for these requests to work their ways through the system so to speak, ostensibly that it couldn't be done right away. It took the intervention of a sympathetic Verizon employee, who also frequented DSLReports.com, fixing things behind the scenes to restore my service to what it had been for years. It worked just fine before and after, proving that they don't have to care, they can do whatever they want. Mind you, it's not that I would have gotten any kind of discount for having the slowern 768/128 service, it would be the same as any other ADSL customer.
Let's fast-forward to September 2023. I finally have had enough of paying an additional $5 per month for the privilege of explicitly paying for FiOS every month instead of auto-paying. I had gone to my credit union and opened another checking account specifically for this purpose. The thought was, I should be able to have some sort of control over how much Verizon takes out of my account; theoretically if I only put $72 in there for them to take, they can't take any more. But, rather than take the chance that I'm going to be charged any overdraft fees, I had them put overdraft protection on that account, linking it to my savings account. I don't know, we'll see how it goes if and when Verizon tries to take too much. But of course, that's just a mundane story of setting this up from the credit union side, nothing to it from a "we don't have to care" perspective.
When one visits the Verizon site and sets this up on one's (Verizon) account, you enter in all this banking information, and ostensibly apply for your discount. I think the idea is that you can't "pull a fast one on them" and set up payment from a Privacy Virtual Card (a.k.a. privacy.com) account, so they don't show it as applicable right away. A Privacy Virtual Card would have my intended effect, them trying to take more than to what they're really entitled, and being denied. That, of course, is not what they want, the whole idea is to be sure they get the money they deem due, I would think so they don't have to spend anything additional (for collections?).
I got my usual email notice that a new FiOS bill was available, so as usual, I logged onto Verizon to fetch a PDF of my bill, verified the amount, and logged onto my credit union to set up payment. But then I decided, this is the month to put the plan into action. So I began the process of setting up autopay. What they will ask you is what day of the month the funds will be taken from the entered account. In my case, the bill is due...let's say, the first week of every month. I chose the day before the due date, because it has not varied. Since that seemed pretty explicit, I went back to the credit union site and cancelled the future payment I had set up. But wait...after you compelete your autopay application/setup, a warning comes up stating, in effect, we're not sure we're going to get paid on time, so here's a button you can click to set up payment for your current balance. Sigh....so I logged back onto the credit union site and repeated my payment request ("Bill Pay"). I get it; much like back in the early oughts, and my "missed premesis visit" billing debacle, I guessed the gears grind very slowly, and accounting would seem to be done only on a monthly basis, meaning any changes would only be applied in the next billing cycle. Heh heh....if only.
Next, I got an email confirming that I have set up autopay. What do you know, it says they'll be taking money from the configured account on the configured day, the day before my next bill is due. Arrrrgggggghhhhh....log back onto the credit union site, RE-cancel my re-set-up payment. Again, they don't have to. They can't be bothered to figure out properly that the selected day is several days in the future, and it is before my bill is due. It's not like I asked them the day before it was to be debited, so therefore their batch processing might miss it. They knew well and good, ahead of time, that it would be ready to go and in effect. And I don't mean whether my discount would happen, I mean when the money will transfer. The amount is not in dispute, I still owe the full amount because it's last month's bill.
If I weren't such a cynical person, I wouldn't be thinking they're just trying to trick me into paying my bill, and also taking their autopay, so they can hang onto my money just like they did when they made up their missed premesis charge. They don't have to have their Web site present accurate information. They don't care, they don't have to; they're the phone company.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!