Douglas has been a customer of Verizon Wireless and its ancestor companies for more than 20 years. He’s an executive at a company that cuts Verizon a five-figure check every month for employees’ devices. You’d think that they would be interested in making sure that he’s always happy, but not so much. When his phone stopped working, they didn’t send him to smartphone replacement purgatory: they killed him. Well, they suspended his account in a way that made it look like he had died.

I’ve been a customer for 22 years.

My smart phone crashed after an automated update was issued by Google and Verizon.
Verizon finally agreed to send me a new phone after two days of haggling. The phone was scheduled to arrive on a Monday; it wasn’t shipped until Monday, and was not sent overnight as Verizon promised. Arriving on Wednesday, I immediately set to activate the replacement phone.

It would not activate.

Four hours later, Verizon told me to let it “activate overnight.” I did so, and found it was not activated on Thursday morning. I needed to catch a flight, so called Verizon enroute, to ask them to activate an old Droid phone I had laying around.

They activated the phone, and all was somewhat well. I checked my account online, and found that they’d given me a new plan.

I called Verizon once I’d landed at my hotel, and they told me they couldn’t figure out why the phone wouldn’t activate, and to not worry about the “new plan.”

Someone there had the idea that if they suspended my account, it might trigger the new phone to activate. Apparently all the activity around the account was keeping the phone from activation.
So, they put in a code that said I was “deceased.” When I later called Verizon back, I had to go through many different security protocols, and eventually learned why. I was apparently dead, so it took a while for Verizon to help me with my Lazarus act.

Here I sit four days later, still no functioning phone, but I have two active plans for two different phones on the same number.

To add insult to injury, my entire company (I am the COO), is on Verizon, so we pay Verizon nearly 10K a month for service. You’d think they’d work with me.

Nope…no replacement for the replacement phone, no replacement SIM card, nothing. Just a lot of “Keep paying your bill, we don’t think your time is worth anything, we’ll eventually get it worked out.”

I’m 11 hours in phone support time, with zero traction.

Sounds like talking to them on the phone isn’t working so well. (Strange, what with them being a phone company and all.) Maybe getting in touch with the region president will be more a more effective use of time. Or an Executive E-mail Carpet Bomb, if the president isn’t helpful.

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