Wrastling with Verizon

A Few Preliminaries.......
—1) A couple weeks ago, my Motorola RAZR® V3m, a so-called “Version” cellphone, got baptized, rendering it crippled — that is, it wouldn’t turn on.
—This means I can’t transfer my contact-list from my old phone, to my new phone, since: -a) My old phone won’t turn on, and -b) my contact-list was never saved to the great Verizon ‘pyooter-in-the-sky.
No matter, I’ve wanted to update my contact-list for some time; weeding out the mighty Mezz, and reorganizing my speed-dials. The RAZR wouldn’t reassign speed-dials (or so it seemed), so I wanted to do everything again.
—2) Since my old phone was tanked, I went to the Verizon store to get a new phone. I was advised I could get a free upgrade as of June 4 — apparently our contract runs through November, but I was eligible for a free upgrade as of that date.
—3) I returned to the Verizon store after June 4 to upgrade my phone — to a Nokia 6205. Since it wasn’t in stock in the store, they suggested their ordering it online.
I had Linda’s RAZR along, so they used it. A MyVerizon® account was set up in her name, so they could order my new phone from her phone.
—4) Attempt to log in to MyVerizon from home — around-and-around we went; Verizon spits back, over-and-over: “incorrect password; incorrect user name; no such account exists.”
—5) Linda calls Customer Service and gets Latisha with a heavy unintelligible accent. “Pardon me?” many times, but finally her MyVerizon account is wiped out so I can set up my own account.
—6) But wait! Seems a MyVerizon account had been set up years ago, when we upgraded from the flip-phones to the RAZRs, with the password I always use; my old RTS badge-number.
But then-again maybe not. “Incorrect password; incorrect user name; no such account exists.”
—7) Call Verizon Customer-Service to get “walked through” setting up my own MyVerizon account.

“Hi; my name is Latisha! Thank you for calling Verizon. We’re happy to serve you!” (Poor girl; she mispronounced the name.)
An earlier insanity occurred before this.
The Verizon Customer-Service is *611 on my cellphone, 1-800-350-2830 on a landline.
*611; “Welcome to Verizon!” Uh-ohhhhh..... A machine call.
“Yada-yada-yada-yada. Please listen to the following menu.
If yada-yada-yada-yada, please dial ‘one’ now.”
“What?” I say.
“If yada-yada-yada-yada, please dial ‘two’ now.”
“What?
You’re rattling it so fast,” I think to myself; “I can’t follow it.”
“If yada-yada-yada-yada, please hang up and call 1-800-???-???? from a landline phone.”
“You rattled that alternative number off so fast, I couldn’t get it; and -a) I had no idea you were gonna throw it at me, -b) it ain’t the Customer-Service number, and -c) I can’t backtrack.
I give up and call Customer-Service from our landline.
Same machine; hope there’s a wait for an “O.” But an earlier option sounds viable, so I hit that. “Hi; my name is Latisha! Thank you for calling Verizon. Please tell me your cellphone number.”
“Um, I thought I already keyed that in,” I think to myself. Why do the Customer-Service reps always want that verbally when I already keyed it in?
“So how can I help you, Mr. Hughes?”
“Well, I try to log in to my MyVerizon account, and it keeps spitting me out.”
“You don’t have one, Mr. Hughes.”
“But I thought I did. What’s my old password for?”
“That’s for something else, Mr. Hughes” — some deeply closeted mystery in the vaunted Verizon system; “but it’s not a MyVerizon account.
You’ll have to set one up. I can walk you through it. See ‘register’ on your computer?”
“What about my wife?” I ask.
“Wiped out,” Linda says in the background.
“She doesn’t have one either,” Latisha yells.
“Yada-yada-yada-yada. Got the form filled in, Mr. Hughes?”
Whoa, Nellie! I can’t type at the speed of light. — I was tempted to reveal I’m a stroke-survivor, and my keyboarding is usually sloppy; but didn’t.
Uh-ohh; into the ozone. “Must have hit a magic key. Everything blew up! Back to square one.”
“Go to the original log-in page, Mr. Hughes; and start the registration again. Hup-hup!”
Registration completed, despite various time-consuming mistypes, so “before I hang up, I’m gonna try this later, and I need to know who to contact if it fails.”
“So try it, Mr. Hughes.”
Okay, ‘pyooter off, back on, and try logging in to MyVerizon.
“IN!” I holler. “That’s all I wanted to do.”
“Glad I could help, Mr. Hughes; have a nice day.” CLICK!

My all-knowing, younger brother-from-Boston, the macho ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, insists “Verizon” is spelled “Version.”

“‘Pyooter” equals computer.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over three years ago. Best job I ever had.

“Linda” is my wife of 41+ years.

We’ve had four cellphones: -1) the pop-tarts, -2) the “stick of butter,” -3) the flip-phones, and -4) the RAZRs. My Nokia 6205 is cellphone number five. (Linda still has her RAZR.)

RE: “My old RTS badge-number......” —RTS equals Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years. My “badge-number” was my employee-number. I use it as a password.

“Customer-Service reps” are Customer-Service representatives.

I had a stroke October 26, 1993, and it compromised my typing.