PINE MOUNTAIN CLUB, CA (MONDAY, MAY 2, 2022AT 2:30 P.M.)—Today the editor of The Mountain Enterprise discovered that it was impossible to complete a call to the newspaper office in Frazier Park using the Verizon service in Pine Mountain Club. The newspaper number is working perfectly well. the problem is with my Verizon cell service and its ability to connect to other numbers in the region.
As many will remember, on Friday, April 22, 2022 many customers were unable to complete calls from their cell phones. That disturbance in service lasted over six hours for many. We eventually were informed that there was a system-wide failure affecting customers throughout California plus other states as well.
Today the same problem recurred for me, beginning shortly after 10 a.m. Suddenly the iPhone failed to complete calls to some numbers in the region. “Verizon is unable to complete that call,” was the recorded message. By noon I confirmed it was not a temporary quirk .I called Verizon Customer Support Center for assistance.
After literally four hours of Verizon customer service purgatory I learned that the difficulty today is somehow linked to the problem of April 22. I was told the “tower network and management issues” resulted in “networks being reset” and that phones needed to be “reset” to link appropriately with the carrier signal.
Long, long, long story short: I am waiting for an official spokesperson to call at 5:30 p.m. for an “on-the-record” report of the nature of this problem. In the meantime however, here are the time-saving tips I learned from this annoying event.
1) When you call Verizon service at 800-922-0204 DO NOT agree to go into the “chat” tech support mode. It will take you on a merry-go-round that ends up after literally 90 minutes of useless “chat” in trying to sell you insurance products for your other computer devices, having zero, ZERO, to do with the phone service problem for which you called in the first place.
2) DO call the 800-922-0204 line. Nope, chat people will not connect you. Yes, you will have to start ALL OVER AGAIN. Tell the robot you want a technical support representative. There will be numerous attempts to get you to submerge yourself again in the useless “chat” service. Don’t do it. Just wait. The first 15-30 minutes will be the voice of an “A-I” system that is long on the “artificial” and short on the “Intelligence” part of that AI acronym. They will keep asking, inviting, you to go immediately into the tech support chat mode. Don’t fall for it. Just keep using your human voice to say “technical support representative.” And wait on hold..on speaker…hopefully doing something else at the same time like scrubbing floors or painting ceilings so you do not feel like your life is flowing away irretrievably.
3) When you finally get a human (and you very likely will at long-last) be polite and kind. Think what their job must be like. Thank them for offering to help, tell them you understand they did not design this system that has led to you spending the better part of your day trying to get a Verizon problem cleared up. Tell them you have a system failure that appears to be linked to the widespread April 22 outage in California, and that you are unable to complete some calls to numbers in your area.
4) It is likely that they will then walk you through a “General Settings” reset of your own smart phone system. Follow their directions very carefully, slowly, and methodically, because you do not want to erase the data on your phone. You want to RESET only. DO NOT let your finger stray close to the “reset and erase” option.
5) Now you will be in good hands. Once you reach this level of technical support I have found personnel to be helpful and apparently honest in clarifying what is going wrong. Just follow the directions, be kind with the person who is helping you, and get the reset done.
It took me 4 hours to get it completed so I could use my phone normally. I hope this note will keep you from that same waste of time. We have been 8-year Verizon customers. Until this past year there were only a couple of system-wide outages. The primary difference now is this useless “chat” diversion triage system that does not have the ability to fix anything, but diverts their call-center traffic to lessen the load, so tech support personnel are not being slammed by too many calls simultaneously.
What may be a temporary corporate ploy is terrible public relations. I will report more when and if I receive the follow-up call from corporate office to provide our readers more detailed information, with attribution to a responsible person who will go on the record with their full name and job title. Not a lot to ask, right? —Patric Hedlund, Editor
UPDATE: from 3:30 to 4:20 p.m. Verizon called me back again, asking if I would please stay on hold. I complied. At 4:25 p.m. PDT Verizon hung up on me. It was a relief. Their “hold” music is terrible. We will now see what happens at 6:30 p.m.
This is part of the April 29, 2022 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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