Found... Finally!

Update: This is an update to an earlier post about my new cell phone woes.

Well, I finally have cell phone service with Verizon. After the guy I talked to yesterday hadn't called back by noon, I called their customer service department once more, this time in obvious exasperation. I laid the whole story out, including that she was the fourth person I had talked to (I also went to a local Verizon store on Saturday, which accomplished nothing). I said that I was having serious doubts about Verizon. After all, if it was this hard—almost a week and counting—to get my phone set up, then how would they respond if I had any other problems?

Dionne, the customer service rep, asked me for one number, the order number from when I originally placed the order. She looked it up—something that no one else I had talked to had been able to do—and said that the order looked fine. She explained that she'll have to build me an account since the old one somehow got overwritten. She asked if she could call back in ten or fifteen minutes, and I said sure, if it will mean that I can get the problem taken care of once and for all.

Well, ten or fifteen minutes later, Dionne called back and said that it was taken care of, I can dial *228 now. I did, and it worked! So I made a test call, and it worked too! I asked why in the world it took that long and talking to four different people (actually around ten, when you include being transferred from department to department) for that ten or fifteen minute problem to be fixed. She said she didn't know, all they had to do was build a new account (with the company discount, of course!), and that she wished that I had talked to her first. Well, I do too, Dionne, and I'm glad that someone at Verizon knows how to handle this problem.

Of course, I still have to wonder, how did my account get overwritten in the first place? I asked Dionne about this, and she said that apparently what had happened is that 1) I ordered the phone and service, 2) they created an account and shipped me the phone, 3) before I got the phone, someone else ordered a phone and service and activated their account, 4) since I hadn't activated my account yet, it took that as the next number in the block, and 5) I had heartache.

Shouldn't their systems know about this possibility and reserve new numbers and accounts for at least several days to get the person who ordered service a chance to activate it? It seems to me that what happened to me would be virtually guaranteed to happened to anyone who ordered service over the Internet. If that were true, I would think that there would be some serious hell to pay at Verizon, so I'm guessing that for most people, it works fine. I'm guessing that for some weird reason, it was just my order that got screwed up. I hope that the problem I went through doesn't just get lost in their system and chalked up as a glitch. I would hope that they really care enough to not want any more customers to have to go throught what I have.

Oh well, I guess we'll see, and if you order Verizon service through the Internet, good luck to you. In the meantime, I've got some free phone calls to make...