Last night, Dave informed me that there was something wrong with our home telephone line. I checked them all to make sure they were plugged in and the "real" phone was not off the hook (both lessons I learned from my kitties). I thought about letting it go for a while to see if the phone would come back on, because sometimes there is a random outage. Finally, I decided I should report it because we needed the phone and our cell phones were both charging.
I called the Bellsouth Repair Line, where I spoke with a representative who clearly did not want to be there. I told her that my phone had no dial tone, something was wrong with the line. She told me that I had changed service providers and my line had been disconnected. HUH?!?! At that point I became progressively more irate because I did not change service providers and neither did Dave. I had to give him the phone because I was about to be VERY rude to the underpaid employee. According to Dave's conversation with her, the change request was made Sunday (8/05) and went into effect Monday. She offered to have Customer Service call us to reinstate our phone line. I was fuming all night long. A thousand scenarios were running through my head: someone has it out for us and wanted to cause us trouble by canceling the phone line (I know it's ridiculous), someone at Bellsouth is an idiot and disconnected the wrong phone line, etc, etc, etc. We never got a call from Customer Service and I went to bed mad. I could not wait until morning to make that phone call.
Advance to 8 a.m. today...... I called Customer Service where I waited on hold for about 6 minutes. I explained my problem to the very nice man who informed me that the service provider I switched to was Level III Communications, and that the request had not come through Bellsouth. He offered to transfer me to someone that could explain how that possibly happened.
I waited on hold another 6 or so minutes. The second man explained that Level III Communications is a cable provider of VOIP (or Voice Over Internet Protocol) service. I explained to him that I had not changed my service, my husband had not changed our service, so how could this have happened? He informed me that it's a legal process and we would have had to sign something or otherwise authorize the change, and that it could have happened by clicking on a pop-up advertisement on the Internet. (Please note that I do not click on pop-up ads because of this exact problem.) I told him again that we did no such thing and I needed to know what I needed to do to fix it and transfer my line back to Bellsouth. He explained that it would take 2 - 3 weeks because Bellsouth would have to petition Level III Communications for our phone number, and that the petition to Bellsouth from Level III had occurred around the middle of July. (In my head I'm thinking: FOR TWO FREAKING WEEKS MY PHONE HAS BEEN IN THE PROCESS OF TRANSFER AND I'M JUST NOW FINDING OUT?!) The man offered to connect me to Sales so I could set of up the reinstatement of my phone line.
I waited on hold another 6 minutes (it felt like hours, I was at work and not working). Ms. Lovett came on the line and we went through the process of transferring the phone line back to Bellsouth. As with everyone else I spoke to, I explained the entire situation. At my request, Ms. Lovett arranged for the petition for my phone number (because YES, I wanted to keep the same one!) to be expedited, as I did not request this change and it is sorely inconvenient for me. She said it would be done by midnight tonight, at no charge to me since I did not request the change. I then had to speak to the Verification Department to authorize the petition of my number and the reinstatement of my phone line. By midnight tonight, it should be working again. I have to say that other than the long hold times, I was very pleased with Bellsouth's handling of the entire situation, especially Ms. Lovett in Sales. (Note: If I get a bill for the reinstatement fee, all hell will break lose.)
The moral of this story: beware of Level III Communications and whatever scam they are running. I promise that neither Dave nor I authorized any changes to our phone service, yet it was changed without our knowledge. We don't even have the hardware for VOIP service!
P.S. If you've called and gotten the "disconnected" message, it's because we got scammed, not because we didn't pay our bill. :)
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