Nothing major to bitch about this month so I'll go back to the stuff I promised about AOL and Verizon. A while back, Verizon made an error and my DSL got shut off. I called them and was happy when I was told "We got your payment and you shouldn't have been disconnected. We'll have you back online in an hour." An hour later I was still not connected so I called them back. "According to our records you should not have been shut off. Let me transfer you to another department. Hold please." I could go on and on with details but let me shorten it and say that I talked to 19 different Verizon reps before I got one that could help me. 19 people and 4 1/2 hours later I got some service. A young fellow named Jeff (at least he sounded young) had good news but not great news. At least he didn't try to fill me full of bull and make impossible promises. He explained that I had to first cancel my account then start another account. I said "OK, let's do it." Apparently its not that easy. It takes 3 days to cancel an account and another 3 days to activate a new account. Throw in a weekend and I'm out 8 days of DSL service. Did I mention that I have now been pissed off for 4 hours? I have to give credit to Jeff, he seemed honestly concerned about my problem and gave me his e-mail addy in case things didn't happen as promised. I'm a pretty good judge of character and I trusted what he said even though I wasn't happy with the outcome.
            I resigned myself to the fact that my DSL was gone for a week and searched the house for one of those free AOL disks. I didn't find one so I drove to Freddy's and picked one up. I installed it and I couldn't connect. 3 hours of talking to AOL people and nothing worked. Now I'm really pissed. I went into my puter and searched for a way to change my internet settings cuz I figured going from DSL to dial-up was causing a problem. I finally gave up and went to bed. Next morning I was determined to find a way to connect and somehow I was eventually successful. Now I'm plagued with slow connection and getting booted from AOL. I suffered through this for 7 days and then, as promised, my DSL was reconnected. After another 2 hours of searching and finding the right settings, I was hooked up again.
            All in all Verizon pissed me off but at least they have one good employee. They also lowered my rate by five dollars a month. As far as AOL goes, they are still calling me to use their shitty product again. I hang up on them every time they call.