Verizon Wireless Disaster part 2
This is part 2 of a series discribing the mistake I made of changing my cell phone service to Verizon. The first part of the story begins here.
Around the middle of this year my contract with Cingular was ended. My wife had the idea to switch to Verizon for a number of pretty good reasons. Frist, her family all uses Verizon which would make for free minutes any time we talk to them on the phone, which for my wife is very very often. Second, Verizon is the only carrier that has service (very hard to find a spot with a signal) at Lake Powell. If you are not using Verizon and you happen to get a signal, you are required to provide a credit card number and charged large sums of money for your call. This might be a regional monopoly, but what does the government care about monopolies or price fixing (see gas prices of 2006, and Microsoft for further reference)? So the choice was made to make the switch.
It's no secret to anyone who's ever ridden as a passenger in my car that I have a difficult time getting to where I want to go. My wife critisizes this little problem quite a bit. I don't know where the local steak house is, I turn down the wrong street on my way to the movie theater, I'm not sure how best to get to the closest mall. However, given an address for my destination and I have no problem at all, at least not here in Utah.
When picking out a phone for my new service and 2 year contract (read: indentured servitude), I was pretty interested in the phone that had GPS capabilities. Verizon has this feature you can subscribe to called vzNavigator. It works like any other GPS address finder in that you type in the address and it tells you step by step where to turn. You can see how that might be good for someone like me if I were somewhere unknown and happen to have addresses for everything. Well, I would soon be going to Florida with my family so it really was something I was planning on using. So after picking out the 2 GPS capable phones and the cheapest phone service (my wife and I have never used more than 700 minutes a month between us), signing my name on all the lines we're good to go, almost. I had to make a trip back to the store a couple days later to straighten out some paperwork that was filled out wrong for the rebates (which woudn't show up for several months later).
Next time we'll talk about that Florida trip. ;)
Around the middle of this year my contract with Cingular was ended. My wife had the idea to switch to Verizon for a number of pretty good reasons. Frist, her family all uses Verizon which would make for free minutes any time we talk to them on the phone, which for my wife is very very often. Second, Verizon is the only carrier that has service (very hard to find a spot with a signal) at Lake Powell. If you are not using Verizon and you happen to get a signal, you are required to provide a credit card number and charged large sums of money for your call. This might be a regional monopoly, but what does the government care about monopolies or price fixing (see gas prices of 2006, and Microsoft for further reference)? So the choice was made to make the switch.
It's no secret to anyone who's ever ridden as a passenger in my car that I have a difficult time getting to where I want to go. My wife critisizes this little problem quite a bit. I don't know where the local steak house is, I turn down the wrong street on my way to the movie theater, I'm not sure how best to get to the closest mall. However, given an address for my destination and I have no problem at all, at least not here in Utah.
When picking out a phone for my new service and 2 year contract (read: indentured servitude), I was pretty interested in the phone that had GPS capabilities. Verizon has this feature you can subscribe to called vzNavigator. It works like any other GPS address finder in that you type in the address and it tells you step by step where to turn. You can see how that might be good for someone like me if I were somewhere unknown and happen to have addresses for everything. Well, I would soon be going to Florida with my family so it really was something I was planning on using. So after picking out the 2 GPS capable phones and the cheapest phone service (my wife and I have never used more than 700 minutes a month between us), signing my name on all the lines we're good to go, almost. I had to make a trip back to the store a couple days later to straighten out some paperwork that was filled out wrong for the rebates (which woudn't show up for several months later).
Next time we'll talk about that Florida trip. ;)
posted by BugHunter at 7:55 AM
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