David and Jenn were sick of Comcast’s unreliable service and decided to switch to Verizon FiOS. It only took 5 appointments and nearly two months.

On the plus side, the Verizon tech did not burn their house down… even once!

December 6th comes. They’re scheduled to arrive between 8am and noon. They call and say they’ll arrive at 10 am. They do. We are happy. They knock on the door and ask if anyone installed a fiber cable in the yard. They have not. They can’t do the install because no one buried the cable. Ok. December 7th someone comes, digs up our front lawn, and buries the cable. We reschedule. Again. December 27th between 8am and 5pm. 5pm comes…and goes. No one shows up. Get back on the phone. They said they came but the cable wasn’t buried. We tell them we’ve been home all day, no one has come, and the cable was buried on the 6th. They say they’ll call us back. We call again the next day. They’ll call us back in 48 hours. 48 hours comes and goes.

So I’m pissed by this point. It’s been over a month, three appointments have been made. Furniture rearranged, time taken off work, etc. etc. I take a helpful tip from the Consumerist and e-mailed the CEO. That was a Friday night. Of course then customer service called and said they’d reschedule us (again) for January 10th. Monday morning came and we got a call from the executive customer service people. They rescheduled us (yeah, again) for January 3rd between 8am and 8:30am and waived our installation fee per my request. January 3rd came and went and no installer. I know, shocking.

There’s a happy ending, Jenn and David did eventually get their Verizon installed, and managed to get their installation fee and a free month of service out of it. They were also pleased that someone from Verizon contacted them to apologize and ask questions about their installation.

She seemed quite sincere about this and I have no reason to disbelieve her. THAT really helps. To own up to the issue and try to make it better from here on out. Well, that and the waiving of the installation fee and the free first month of service we’ll be getting after I spoke to the executive customer service guy again.

The Great FiOS Debacle -Updated [Jenn’s Journal]
(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

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