Your mileage may vary

1. Bathroom safety bars are already installed
2. Your share of the rent is negligible because the mortgage is paid off
3. They admire you for knowing how to work all the remote controls
4. Dad does all of your laundry. “Hey, I ain’t doin’ anything else. I might as well do my share.”
5. Mombo is in bed by 6:30. Dad stays up ’til eight thirty
6. You can use their car mostly anytime, as long as you drive them to the doctors, WallMart, or Pik N Save
7. Somebody’s always home to answer the door.
8. When you fall off your knee walker in the garden, there’s someone to root you on as you struggle to your feet.
9. The freezer’s always full
10. There’s always pie!

I have enough mental problems without Verizon gaslighting me.

Trying to be a Good Little Monkey, I canceled my Fios service and dropped the converter boxes off at the UPS store, when I moved from New Jersey to Wisconsin in December.

My mail caught up with me in March. Verizon is still billing me $85.10 a month for December, January and March. Also, I now get letters and calls on my cell phone from a collection agency.

If you’ve ever called VZ, you know about the circles of Telephone Hell: menu selections, dropped calls, the ‘wrong person’. It will make you crazy if you aren’t already. Figure about 40 minutes per contact, most ly with your phone pasted against your ear listening to Vivaldi.

This Good Little Monkey did that, and Mr. Verizon said “Oh, gee, there’s an error with your account. I’ll fix it immediately. Sorry, we can’t get the collection agency off your tail. Sorry.”

I’m sure there was a lot of ha ha haing, high fives and general merriment in the Verizon Customer Assistance Call Center. Today I got my April bill for $85.10 plus $490.78 back due “Please pay on receipt”.

Fortunately, I figured out how to set my call phone to “No Ring” for the collection agency’s calls.

VZ update, May 2009

Billed me again for another $85.10. I called and New Mr. Verizon said the Old Mr. Verizon did not ‘follow thru” and nothing was done—but he would absolutely fix it. Whew. That’s a relief.

Part one of two: Wylie Coyote visits the DMV

I’m trying to be a good citizen, now. I moved to my home state from New Jersey and I dutifully went to the DMV for my Wisconsin driver’s license. My sister warned me that the DMV is infamous for sucking, but, Jeez—I’m from New Jersey. How bad could it be?

I survived the new, improved, privatized NJ DMV “Six Points of ID” system. And that’s a really scary process because they deal with a lot of undocumented aliens and the staff is very jaded. Rude, too, but in a superficial “I treat everyone like this, it’s not personal” way. You walk out feeling used and abused by the process–not by the processors.

I presented myself at the “Milwaukee – Northwest service center at 7301 W. Mill Road confident that the innate courtesy of Milwaukeeans would make this visit a memorable and satisfying experience. (No, really. Don’t laugh. I was really feeling it.)

Ok. you can snigger a little if you must.

While the NJ office employees were supercilious, snotty and arrogant, they were, at least, even-handed. The abuse was vetted in an “equal opportunity” manner. The Milwaukee employees were ignorant, unprofessional and capricious, selectively enforcing (or over-enforcing) the rules depending on the victim which stood before them.

Short version: I got hosed. Again and again. (You can read the whole story in part 2 of this blog.) It didn’t help that the written ‘rules’ for proof of residency and proof of name are unnecessarily narrow and written documentation vague.

Me being me, I came home from my 4th fruitless attempt and wrote a scathing letter to the DMV. I addressed it to Supervisor “Gerald Williams”, his supervisor, “Debbie Kramer”, and the DOT Customer Relations Department in Madison. Boy. I showed them! It was a pretty good letter, too. Too bad nobody read it. You can read it, though. It’s in my next blog entry. This one is getting too long.

Epilogue

The next week I went to the Northeast branch of the DMV with the same documentation, and sailed out in 20 minutes with my shiny new Wisconsin Driver’s license. The picture wasn’t horrendous, either.