I've decided that Verizon has a massive advertising budget and a tiny service/product improvement one. They hypnotize everyone with their very cool ads into thinking they have a good product, so that's what we all do -- think they have a product worth the ungodly prices they charge -- and they have a horrible product. It's expensive and it's unreliable. And we gobble it up like the brainwashed fools we've all become. Some of us know enough to resent it -- but they've got us by the short hairs. You can't survive without wireless any more. And there is effectively no competition. We're all captive rabbits. There is no choice. No competition. None.
They lure us into long-term contracts by giving away those few ounces of plastic and silicon they call "phones" which they charge hundreds of dollars for sans contract. They render those little hunks of junk obsolete every year or so so we'll think we have to spend a couple hundred more on the next new plastic & silicon toy they come up with. Those phones are the epitome of everything that's wrong with the world. Find a Stromberg-Carlson phone from the 50's and compare it to your Droid or your iPhone. One is a work of solid, well-designed, well-built industrial age art that will still be working in the year 2525 -- if Verizon and AT&T don't succeed in removing the option of landline service from the buying public forever. They are vastly superior to wireless phones in every conceivable way except portability and I don't see why we can't have both options in our so-called capitalistic, free-market society. The whole thing blows.
It's impossible to discuss our wireless "service" (huge misnomer -- should be our wireless captivity) with anyone who has the power to render any satisfaction regarding any issue other than technical assistance because there isn't anyone on their payrolls or in their "service" centers besides pushy, obnoxious salespeople and underpaid, outsourced tech experts whose English is difficult to understand despite their beautiful manners and outstanding qualifications. Aside from the maddening experience talking to them is for Verizon and AT&T's customers, their lives must be a living hell. I feel so sorry for those people. They've been trained to apologize profusely, and constantly, for everything. I wonder why that is? Could it be because the people they have to talk to are universally, and justifiably, furious? God what a horrible job. Average tenure must be about 20 minutes.
Their landline service is the ugly red-headed stepchild of their product lineup. They don't want to be bothered with landline -- and with the prices we are all talking here about for these wireless bells and whistles they've managed to convince us we must have, you can see why. Compared to landline, wireless is next to no maintenance and a massive profit margin. And why should they worry about their landline product anyway. They've got a government-sanctioned monopoly. They don't have to worry about competition -- remember competition? that free-market remedy for all these ills? It's dead. Dead and buried. Especially for their captive landline customers. There isn't any competititon to speak of. We will pay their ungodly prices for either their awful landline product or their awful wireless one and we'll like it -- or we will not have either one. The smattering of alternative providers is a joke -- and that's no accident either. There are precious few of them, their pricing is almost identical, and their service is at least as bad.
AT&T isn't any better than Verizon. They are identical twins. Both companies are two corporate monsters of the first order -- and with Congress' help, they have eliminated any and all competition. Forget their inflated prices and crappy service for their wireless products. Just try to get landline service in an area where one of those two monsters operate. You'll get nowhere. And believe it or not, lots of people would like to keep their landline service, for lots of excellent reasons. And whether or not they "should" want landline isn't the point. If they want it, they should be able to buy it. But IF they want it, they WILL buy it from one of the two monsters who offer it, and if either monster does a terrible job, which they will, the days of "I'll take my business elsewhere" are gone. There is no elsewhere.
Where are the trustbusters when we need them?
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