Rosalea Barker: I, technofool, part 2

It’s been 10 weeks since I wrote the first post about getting connected to the Internet, and this week’s proposal from Verizon and Google spurred me to write some more about my experience. Here is FCC Commissioner Copps’ August 9 response to the Verizon-Google announcement:

“Some will claim this announcement moves the discussion forward. That’s one of its many problems. It is time to move a decision forward—a decision to reassert FCC authority over broadband telecommunications, to guarantee an open Internet now and forever, and to put the interests of consumers in front of the interests of giant corporations.”

::Taken to the cleaners by Sprint::

My last post left you with how things stood at the end of May. At the end of the first week in June, Sprint would be selling its new 4G phone, Evo, so I went online at the WiFi café and had a chat with a sales representative. If I ordered it online the day it became available, I’d be waived the new connection fee, but I’m not one to buy something that’s going to cost me thousands of dollars over the period of a two-year contract without first looking at what I’m going to buy in real life.

So I googled “Sprint store locations” and found that there was one close to my homeward-bound bus route. I stored the address in my gray matter and set off to see this new wonder of connectivity. Never mind that the nearest 4G network was hundreds of miles away in Portland, Oregon—the phone would work on the 3G network until the Bay Area caught up with the rest of the world, I thought, futuristically.

Getting off the bus, I was surprised to find that the address was the corporate headquarters of Clorox, a company that makes cleaning products. Silly old brain, I thought scoldingly, I’ve misremembered! So I searched again on my trusty old Verizon-powered Blackberry, but when I clicked on the link button on the search results to get to the address results, nothing happened. Repeated clicks, reloading the page, and new searches all produced the same results. Was Verizon blocking access to links that took you to a rival telco, I wondered, in my endearingly paranoid way.

Nothing for it but to go into the Clorox corporate HQ and ask if there was a Sprint store nearby. “Oh, there used to be one,” I was told, “but it closed some time ago.” Sure enough, in the window of an empty storefront in the Clorox building was a typed notice saying that the store had moved about 20 miles away back in February. Jeez! If a company whose livelihood is dependent on the Internet can’t even get its store location pages up to date within three months, who wants to do business with them?

::AT&T give it their best shot::

About a week later, I’m sitting at home and get a call from an AT&T representative who wants me to get Uverse. He starts off by telling me that “your needs are important”, but by this time I’ve pretty much decided that I don’t want home Internet after all, so he has to try and sell me on their cable television services instead. I tell him that involves me moving everything in my living room around to get the TV close to where the coax cable that’s already there enters the building, but I’ll think about it. He says he’ll call again in three weeks, but never does. Presumably he has (rightly) concluded that I’m not all that interested.

Truth be told, the only programs I really enjoy on TV are Korean soap operas, and they’re free-to-air. I can’t help but notice that no matter which program it is, unless it’s a historical drama, the single biggest plot-moving device is—the cellphone. South Korea has one of the fastest broadband networks in the world. It is seemingly also full of happy, laughing people, gorgeous apartments, crime-free streets, and subtitlers who learned their English in Australia. “You’re such a dag!” says one subtitle. (But I digress).

::Back in the V-fold::

Finally, I decide to get the latest Blackberry from Verizon. This should be easy, right? I go to the store, tell the young woman who logs in customers that I’m here to buy the new Bold, and then go down the back to look at it and see what it can do while I wait for a salesperson to become free. I wait and wait and wait. I’m standing at the rear of the store with my back to it, and expect when I turn around that it must be full of customers.

To my surprise, there are seven store employees and just three customers including myself. I walk up to the counter and ask if anyone wants to sell me a phone. Seems that I had not been entered into the log, and despite the presence of an actual human being in their store looking at their phones, the sales staff had chosen to stand looking at the computer screen log instead, waiting for a new customer to appear.

Hey, I’ll give you that I’d been to that store three times before—once to get them to test my old phone with one of their USB cables, and another two times to look at phones without buying one—so perhaps they thought I was just there to annoy them. After all you only have to google “hate Verizon” to come up with thousands of entries from disgruntled customers. (Substitute any other wireless carrier and you’ll get the same result.)

So, I buy the phone. I’m assured by the salesman that there is a CD with it containing the software I need to use the phone as a modem. Which is as it was when I bought my first phone from them. Huh! When I open up the box on the way home, there’s no CD, just a web address that I have to go to for a download. Last laugh’s on me! Which part of “no connection to the Internet” does this company not understand?

::Thoroughly modern moi::

One last trip to a WiFi café and I’m good to go with my Internet connection. It works fine. I’m a happy camper. And even feeling adventurous. I patriotically watch a US Fifa World Cup game on my cellphone as I do my grocery shopping, having paid an extra $3 to get that day’s live streaming video. I explore the world of apps. Timidly, because they seem to me like an open invitation for your phone to get infected with malware. But I confess that reading news using the Thomson Reuters app is now my main way of keeping up to date with what’s going on in the world.

Now I see why telco wireless delivery of the Internet is the battleground that it is. It is incredibly convenient. Can’t say I’d want to waste my battery life listening to downloaded music and videos, but the phone takes brilliant photos, and that’s a definite plus over the old one. A definite minus is that the data port on the new one supports mini-USB, a fidgety invitation to early malfunction if ever there was. And as I had already found out with my earlier phone, equipment malfunction isn’t covered by insurance.

::Just one more gripe::

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a medal. But I have one more gripe, and it’s to do with what I see as a new way that financial institutions have found to charge fees. See, I was entitled to a free phone. But part of that “freeness” consisted of a rebate card, which was mailed to me a couple of weeks later.

The card is a pre-loaded debit card, and it comes with lots of fine print, plus a large-print insert that says some uses of the debit card will incur fees according to the fee schedule. Search as I might in the fine print, nowhere could I find a “fee schedule”, nor any explanation of what uses of the card would incur a fee. So I have to play Russian roulette when using the card. Maybe someone should be looking at the compact Verizon-Citibank has. The soon-to-be-appointed Consumer-Czar, perhaps.

But that’s not even the worst of it, as this February 2010 post on one of Verizon’s own forums attests:

“I believe that Verizon and CitiBank are {please keep your posts courteous}.Here is how it worked with me. I purchased two new phones and was told that I'd be receiving two rebate debit cards in the mail for $50 each. I received them and when I tried to use them at a Target store, I was told that one card had 5 cents on it and the other card had $1.50 on it. The Target clerk apologized, I was embarrassed and paid cash instead.

“I called CitiBank and asked them why I only had a total of $1.55 between the two cards when there should have been $100.00 on them. CitiBank informed me that they had been used in a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles, before I had ever even opened them. I asked the CitiBank customer service representative what I could do and he said that they would send me a form in the mail and that I needed to fill one out for each card, have them notarized and send it back to CitiBank. He informed me that their fraud division would look into it for up to 45 days and get this, MAY offer a refund. I asked the Customer Service guy, what if they don't? He said, well I don't know. I live in Massachusetts and have never been to Los Angeles. I asked him if this has ever happened before and he said that it was quite common. Can you believe that?

“I called Verizon and they told me that I needed to wait the 45 days to see what happens. I asked the Verizon rep, what if I was denied by CitiBank? She said, I'm not sure.

“I Googled my problem and low and behold, this same thing happened to other Verizon rebate customers! So, Verizon and CitiBank both know that this scam is happening, but they are allowing it to continue.”

Sigh! All this would be bad enough, but Citibank was bailed out by US taxpayers to the tune of billions. Someone needs to apply a cleated boot to their daggy behind, if you ask me.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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