Verizon's Stealing My Money!

Well, Verizon is the Microsoft of phone companies, no doubt. In case you WERE in doubt, this may interest you. I am currently on the local "timeless" plan on my dial-up connection. This is, of course, a wonderful plan for me because it means I have unlimited local calling, and I don't have extra charges associated with unnecessary long distance options. Until I got this letter today (boilerplate salutations and unrelated material removed for space), at least:

Basically, this translates to:

Dear Customer,
**** you. You don't pay us enough on your current plan so we'll bill the **** out of you for things you don't need or use until you switch to a long-distance plan.

What can I do? I don't need long distance on this line, and I don't know if anyone but Verizon offers local calling in this area... now what?

And forget about government intervention.... the damn company has politicos in every pocket...

Any tips? Anyone else dealt with these idiots? I'm totally at a loss for what I can do, and, frankly, I may just switch to AT&T long distance or something just to get away from these imbeciles. Trouble is, this is like Microsoft, they're customers are all slobbering idiots who don't realize that when they hear "pull down your pants, bend over, and close your eyes" they SHOULDN'T do it, so the company's not gonna hurt... man am I mad...

Man, I knew that Verizon was a beast, but this is way over the top! Switch to Sprint

No DSL either... in my location I probably can't get it from anyone, but, even if I did find it from another company, if something went wrong, your phone company almost always has to contact Verizon for the fix, which, of course, does not benefit Verizon to do quickly or accurately:

[2600.com article]
http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=14

Trouble is, there just aren't any real options, and there really isn't any legal ways to fight companies like this these days

Boycott? Nope. They blame the economy, and, since we don't do the whole survival of the fittest in America anymore, they get a government bailout. OR, even more likely, the other customers are too damn stupid or just don't care, so they don't join you.

Government? Pshaw right... these companies buy and sell congresspersons like the elections were an auction.

Litigation? Not unless you got a ****load of money to burn. Even if you have a valid case, they can bury you in paper for years until your money or strength runs out.

Hopeless...

[edit]
Checking out sprint now... might be an alternative.

Know what else pisses me off? Social Security number is supposed to be really important and private, but ever damned company on earth gets and keeps it... and people wonder why identity theft has proliferated so, lately?
[/edit]

Don't take no for an answer until you are absolutly beat. I'm UK so I don't know who this 'Verizone' is, but one recent example;
My mobile is on Orange and I purchased a pack that lets you have 5 free texts every day for a one off charge of £15, but then recently they sent out a letter saying 'From ??/11/00 your text allowance will be reduced to 3' They've also upped to charge to £19.99 and made it yearly, but only for new purchases. Myself and around 300 others wrote back saying 'No, screw you, you entered a contract and you're not getting out of it!' They backed down and sent an SMS saying 'Your allowance has reverted back to 5 a day and you will recieve a rebate of 80p for SMS's for which you have been charged for'.

Read your contract, re-read it, make notes and take them on, I always do and nearly always win. The only problem is most have something like:

Rule 785: We reserve the right to change any of the rules as we please.

But thats life.

That's pretty much standard over here in America... companies over here pretty much run rampant and do what they want to whom they want whenever they want. I sent off a scathing (read: crude) letter to them figuring that I could send two types:

1. A well-thought out, informative, intelligent letter
or
2. A crude, lewd, and downright rude flame.

but I figured I could only get 1 response:

1. Ignored.

And seeing as the 2nd letter type made me feel better, I went with that one They sent me a response saying that there was a plan online that I might be interested and that they "understand my frustration". I sent a response to it that contained the text of the attached file (file is zipped plain text, no worries). Warning: file is PG-13.

File: http://home.earthlink.net/~l0g0m0tion/flip_off.txt

Ah well.. let's see where this goes..

You can usually be as offensive as you like if you have a sound legal base

What is really needed is a good independant watchdog that people actually listen to. If there was a site that everybody went to and respected, then maybe some companies would try harder not to get on the 'avoid at all cost - scum' list.

It seems even the best, nicest companies eventually get bitten by the greedy bug.

hehe. I did tech support for the biggest isp here in canada which also turns out to be the only telco and one of my fortunes resumed exactly what they have in mind: "We don't care. We don't have to. We'ere the phone company."

At some points I had to explain to the cust why their monthly fee was raised AND that they now had a cap on the bandwith too. At the same time we had to start selling crap to them too.

I work at a place that does this sort of thing to people, but on a much smaller scale (although, to be fair, it's the really stupid people who don't read things before they sign them that really get shafted). What pissed me off the most when I did CS for them was that the management or marketers would make some decision that really hurt the customers, then they'd give us some lame reasoning as to why this was better for the customers. Examples:

Me: We pulled the 800 number.
Customer: Why?
Req. Response: It keeps the cost of the product lower.

This was at the same time that our shipping rates went up nearly 15% and the average price of the product shot up more than 30%

But you have to admit, the reaonsing for this sort of thing was simple:

We have so many customers, that we can drop them left and right and not really feel it. As long as we keep the big spenders happy, we can totally screw everyone else and we are A-OK.

That's the problem with these really big companies, they don't make their money off of us little twerps like a smaller company would, they make their big bucks off of other big clients... so they can shove anything down our throats they want and it doesn't make a difference to them. This is the capitalist system at work. The rich and powerful use their money and influence to get more money and power, and they take it from the average working joe six pack I've been seriously entertaining the idea of leaving the U.S. to find work in Eurpoe or Australia because I've had it with the way government and big business are just left and right bitch-slapping the average worker. It's gotten to the point where even when I get a raise, I get bitten by corporates by things like this and lose the money right away anyhow! Whatever, if the U.S. wants to knock itself off the world-competition stand fine.. I'll just leave.