Leaving Verizon

We left Verizon last week after a long and tumultuous,(I've apparently got no idea how to spell tumultuous. It  took me eight tries and Google) and dare I say occasionally beautiful, relationship of six years.

1) Honestly, we'd been wanting to break up with Verizon for a while. The thing is, things were off and on for the past three years and that's just no way to be in a positive working relationship. We'd go along for a month, everything great, do you want to watch this youtube video of a kitten on a slide? Do I! Maybe I'll open nine tabs at once and try to browse the whole internet. No problem. And then we'd come home one day, sunny just like the one before and Verizon would refuse to work. No cat videos. No Michigan football. No nothing. We had to go downstairs and coax Verizon to work with us. And just when we thought it had been fixed Verizon would shut down again, and needed more from us. I just couldn't keep living in the void like that, not knowing which day Verizon would decide to leave us.

2) Like any major decision in life, marriage, kids, job changes, deciding to change your internet provider is not the sort of thing you want to take lightly. I felt like we had developed some solid relationships with people across the globe, and it's tough to leave them behind. Sure none of them ever changed a damn thing about our intermittent service, but they were our incompetent Verizon folks, and I think I'm going to miss them. What happens now when I call our new ISP? Am I going to wait on hold for twenty minutes only to talk with a person who, after making me give my address, mother's maiden name, SSN, and first child's liver, in order to access my information, says that they can't help me. But, of course they can transfer me to someone who does. They dutifully give me the phone number, "in case you get disconnected," which basically means, "I can't wait to disconnect you, you bastard." And sure enough, disconnected. Well I'll just pull out this handy dandy phone number and direct connect. BAM! Talking to a machine. Wait, what? I shi- you not, I once had a conversation where I was disconnected on four different occasions that took a full two hours to complete. It's that sort of incompetence that leaves me wondering whether I'll ever find it again. Sigh. Now I know how Keats felt.

3. Promises. Oh, the promises. How I'll miss having them lavished upon me. Remember that time, where, after completing an hour or so service call, which included them claiming that they didn't even have our modem on file anywhere, that they promised a new modem? Did that modem ever arrive? No. But imagine me, sitting at the mail slot dutifully each day like a child at Christmas just waiting for our new modem to appear. "Do  you think it will be blue like our old one?" "Will it turn the internet into the information superhighway, or fly like the Delorion?" After a month or so I started to give up hope. I grew despondent and often went downstairs late at night to stare at our old modem. I wondered why it wasn't good enough anymore, why I'd wanted a change at all. I tried to tell it that I hadn't really wanted a new modem, but I could tell things between us were through. It provided intermittent service for a week.
And in our final hours, when I was finally cancelling, Verizon promised to upgrade me to Fios. Sure they said your building has been upgraded, even though we haven't lived in a building for three years, but I know that they really meant it. A part of me really wanted to believe that they were going to provide internet so fast that it would burn my retinas, but I just didn't know it was true. I cancelled anyway, but I think I'll always wonder if that was the conversation where Fios got away, and whether, surfing the web, trying to watch a movie while downloading mp3's and listening to an audible.com book about French cooking, if I'll regret not being able to have everything all at once.