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My Recent Verizon Experience

pbenz — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:46:22 +0000

Several weeks ago, I made some changes to my FiOS account, and noticed that my last bill was not automatically paid by their EasyPay system. With the next payment being due today (9/28/2011), and still no activity on the account, I had to give them a call. The website stated, clearly, that I was still enrolled in EasyPay. That is, when you could actually get that page to fully load – the EasyPay section would display a custom spinning animation while I waited and waited, and if you click to leave the page, you get a popup asking you to take a survey as to why you didn’t enroll in EasyPay. (I filled it out once – use your imagination as to what I wrote.)

While attempting to connect to an agent on the phone, their automated system asked me to enter an account number from my most recent paper bill. I haven’t received a paper bill in months, and the website was displaying THREE different account numbers:

In the upper right, my phone number was labeled as the “Account Number”
In the lower left, there was some text indicating to give a different number if asked. The number was roughly 15 digits long, with the 10 digits you were supposed to give in bold.
In the lower right, there was yet another number labeled “Verizon Online Account Number”

Of course, none of these were accepted by the automated system. Thankfully, once I got through to a human, the remainder of the experience was positive. The rep told me the website was wrong about my enrollment status, instructed me to make a one-time payment via the web minus the $7 late fee they charged for missing the first payment, and then had me re-enroll in EasyPay.

One last somewhat unrelated dig: the URLs for the website are all .aspx. Now I’m not going to bash MS here (as much as I enjoy doing so), but I will say that in my experience, sites built with this technology (ASP.NET) always seem to exhibit these types of problems. It’s rare that they don’t. I fully believe that you can write quality code in any language targeting any platform, but I’d wager that ASP.NET makes it really easy to write bad code (just like VB and PHP), so therefore it’s really easy to end up with crappy websites like the Verizon site. This technology tends to attract developers who either don’t care about quality, are ignorant of how to build quality sites, or are just plain bad developers.

Quick Windows (XP) Gripe #2

pbenz — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:19:25 +0000

The “Show Desktop” feature of Windows is a joke. Here’s the before picture:

And here’s what it looks like after I clicked the “Show Desktop” icon twice (once to show the desktop, again to “restore” (ha!) it):

Quick Windows (XP) Gripe #1

pbenz — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:14:25 +0000

This type of error happens MUCH less frequently in OS X:

All images are gone!

pbenz — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:50:38 +0000

I just now realized that when I converted from MoveableType to WordPress (on a different hosting provider), the images were pointing to the old site, so when I canceled that service, they disappeared forever.

Edit: I managed to recreate a few of the images, so we’re back in business.

WordPress

admin — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 01:18:30 +0000

Yikes! Here I go with a new hosting provider and a new blogging tool. I’m now planning on blogging every single minute of every single day of my life: imagine, you’ll be able to find out what I had for breakfast, how long I spent in the can, what I dreamed about? BET YOU CAN’T WAIT???

But seriously, I probably won’t touch this thing for a while because, in the words of the great George Costanza: “I’ve got nothing to say”.