My God. I was listening to that and thought, "Well, this must be almost over," but it was only like 20% of the way through. Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch.

Google could have helped that guy out:

.002 cents times 35893

The customer is George Vaccaro, and he has a blog, VerizonMath.

Here's another call to Verizon about the same issue. Bonus points: Rep has southern accent.

*wham* *wham* *wham* *wham*

At least he got some guys to listen to him. I hate calling tech support. Last time I spent a whole hour until the guy in India was satisfied that the state of affairs was as I had described it at the beginning of the call.

I hate calling tech support because: I have worked tech support, and I know that the person calling (in this case me) is calling because he is [I am] stupid and does [do] not understand the simple interfaces of the product. For instance: last night I called Brother tech support to find out why my printer was not reporting its ink levels correctly; the guy from India patiently walked me through taking the cartridges out, unplugging the printer, powering it back on, reinstalling the cartridges. Where he could easily have just said, "You need to power down and reinstall the cartridges lame-o" and hung up on my non-power-user ass. Oh well, at least my printer works now.

in my case, the product was broken

i omitted the most frustrating part - i was getting a certain screen with the product (wireless modem) that was basically all he needed to know that the thing wasn't working right. I told him about it at the beginning, several times. He just waited for me to shut up so he could go through his routine. An hour later..."oh, what screen?" This is fairly typical in my experience; no one listens. I have to take my car back to the shop for the exact same reason.

Michael, you should have told the tech support guy at the beginning of the phone call about that screen you were getting, instead of waiting till the end to do so.

Sometimes the tech support guys work off of a checklist (make sure computer is turned on; make sure keyboard is plugged in, etc.) and they won't let you jump ahead to where the problem is actually occurring.

Heh.