Verizon’s customer service is operated by robots. Apparently, these robots are not too skilled at determining whether or not you are also a robot. This might be useful to know during the upcoming robot apocalypse (see this educational film about the subject,) but for reader Carlos it had no practical application.

Carlos writes (to Verizon):

Hi, friendly Verizon’s real-person customer-support representative:

This morning, around 7:00am, I tried to tune my FIOS DVR box so my son could watch cartoons while I fix him breakfast. All his favorite channels were not accessible. Instead of seeing a “You are not subscribe” or “We have a problem” warning, the box immediately switched to this adult comedy radio channel that I did not know that existed. I tried several channels with the same result. In summary, I did not have access to any public television channels and many of the kid’s channels.

I called Verizon’s 888 support numbers and went over the trouble shooting process with your friendly customer support computer. Your computer determined that it could not solve the problem and attempted to transfer the call to a real-person technician. Your computer could not find a real-person technician so it gave me the option to have one call me when available. After that I received three calls. In all of them your friendly customer support computer determined that I was a voice-mail service and attempted to leave a message that it will call later.
The original problem was never solved.

In short, I have to thanks Verizon to enhance my six year old vocabulary with all kind of profanities and to have friendly customer support computer that seem to enjoy making telephone pranks.

I sincerely hope that the FCC start a probe on this type of malfunctions of your services and hit Verizon with several multi-million dollar fines.

Regards,
Carlos
A friendly subscriber to Verizon’s FIOS Telephone, Network, and TV Services.

Carlos sent us an update that his TV has stopped swearing at his child, but he never did get a response from Verizon.

That’s robots for you. Rude.

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