The company that recently bought out my ISP has been advertising their internet services a lot through the local cable company (the commercials are asbolutely horrible, btw), and they have been touting their “fast, friendly customer service.” Well, the same company also bought out US Worst in this county, so now I’m stuck with them for phone and internet service. Anyway, I got an email saying they are going to consolidate my internet and phone bill, and I wanted to know whether or not my internet bill would still be charged to my credit card. So I sent an email to the address listed for billing questions, and after no response in five days, sent another email to somebody else at the company. Finally, after 19 fucking days, I got a response that basically said, “We’re not sure.”
I could seriously go off for hours on how bad this company is. The quality of their TV commercials is horrible, with as many lens flare effects as you can shake a stick at (whatever that means), and people reading poorly-written scripts at a 5th grade (or worse) reading level. I can only connect to their supposed 56K dialups at 28.8, with extremely frequent disconnects, which can only be blamed on them, as I replaced the phone line from my modem to the box, and they recently acquired the rest of the line from US Worst. Technical support is almost nonexistant–when you call with a problem, they make you go through the settings on your computer, even when it’s obviously a problem with their equipment. There have been times when I was dialed in and connected to the internet just fine, when I lost all connection to the outside world through ICQ, email, http, ftp, AIM, and any other internet clients, though I still maintained a modem connection, and the uneducated people at their office insisted that it was a problem with my computer, even after verifying my settings (which haven’t changed in almost a year) and rebooting.
I’ve known for quite some time how uneducated and inefficient 99% of the people around here are, but now that some of them have enough money to start running local businesses and buying out equipment and service from huge corporations, it’s getting scary. Oh, and if I suddenly lose internet access and my site disappears from this server, you’ll know how much they liked my criticism. =)